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HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT 



LONDON FILMS 



By W. D. HOWELLS 



ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

1905 



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Copyright, 1905, by Harper & Brothers. 

All rights reserved. 

Published October, 1905. 



CONTENTS 

COAPTER ^"^ " 

I. Meteorological Emotions 1 

II. Civic and Social Comparisons, mostly Odious 10 

III. Shows and Side-Shows of State 22 

IV. The Dun Year's Brilliant Flower .... 35 
V. The Sights and Sojqnds of the Streets . . 47 

VI. Some Misgivings as to the American Invasion 56 

VII. In the Gallery of the Commons 68 

VIII. The Means of Sojourn 74 

IX. Certain Traits of the London Springtime . 82 
X. Some Voluntary and Involuntary Sight- 
seeing 88 

XI. Glimpses of the Lowly and the Lowlier . 100 

XII. Twice-Seen Sights and Half-Fancied Facts 118 

XIII. An Afternoon at Hampton Court .... 137 

XIV. A Sunday Morning in the Country. . . 150 
XV. Fishing for Whitebait 159 

XVI. Henley Day 165 

XVII. American Origins— Mostly Northern ... 178 

XVIII. American Origins— Mostly Southern ... 203 

XIX. Aspects and Intimations 222 

XX. Parting Guests 232 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT Frontispiece 

FLEET STREET AND ST, DUNSTAN's CHURCH Facing p. 12 

THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE . " 18 

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK " 24 

ROTTEN ROW " 38 

A BLOCK IN THE STRAND " 48 -' 

ST, Paul's cathedral " 80 -^ 

WESTMINSTER ABBEY " 86 ' 

the horse guards, WHITEHALL " 98 ' 

WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER " 160" 

A HOUSE-BOAT ON THE THAMES AT HENLEY .... " 168 

THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY " 174 

THE TOWER OF LONDON " 184 

ST. OLAVE'S, TOOLEY STREET " 186 

LONDON BRIDGE " 188 

THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS " 190- 

THE EAST INDIA HOUSE OF CHARLES LAMB's TIME . . " 192 

CHURCH OF THE DUTCH REFUGEES " 194 - 

BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE) " 196 

staple inn, holborn " 214 

Clifford's inn hall " 216 

ancient church of st. martins-in-the-fields ... " 218 ' 

hyde park in october " 222 

thames embankment " 226 



LONDON FILMS 



LONDON FILMS 



METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 

WHOEVER carries a mental kodak with him (as 
I suspect I was in the habit of doing long before 
I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of the 
different exposures. This can be determined only by 
the process of developing, which requires a dark room 
and other apparatus not always at hand; and so much 
depends upon the process that it might be well if it 
could always be left to some one who makes a specialty 
of it, as in the case of the real amateur photographer. 
Then one's faulty impressions might be so treated as to 
yield a pictorial result of interest, or frankly thrown 
away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye. 
Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust 
the result, whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness 
of the reader, who will surely, if he is the right sort of 
reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to soften 
the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a subordi- 
nation giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. 
This is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any 
one shall say that my little pictures are superficial, I 
shall not be able to gainsay him. I can only answer 

1 



LONDON FILMS 

that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but 
at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of 
those who would prefer some such result as the em- 
ployment of the Roentgen rays would have given, if 
applied to certain aspects of the London world. 

Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a 
life-long dweller. To the sojoiu-ner scarcely more will 
vouchsafe itself than to the passing stranger, and it is 
chiefly to home-keeping folk who have never broken 
their ignorance of London that one can venture to 
speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving 
which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns 
of differing lengths and dates. One could have used 
the authority of a profound observer after the first few 
days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks 
stretching to months in 1882 and 1883, clouded rather 
than cleared the air through which one earliest saw 
one's London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 
1897, with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have 
but served to confirm one in the diffident inconclusion 
on all unportant points to which I hope the pages fol- 
low^ing will bear witness. 

^Vhat appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid 
a shimmer of self-question, is that any one coming to 
London in the beginning of April, after devious delays 
in the South and West of England, is destined to have 
printed upon his mental films a succession of meteoro- 
logical changes quite past computation. Yet if one 
were as willing to be honest as one is willing to be 
graphic, one would allow that probably the weather 
on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving 
with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference 
is that at home, having one's proper business, one 
leaves the weather to look after its own affairs in its 

2 



METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 

own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness 
of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes cen- 
sorious. If I were to be a little honester still, I should 
confess that I do not know of any place where the month 
of April can be meaner, more 'poison, upon occasion, 
than in New York. Of course it has its moments of 
relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase 
which is the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when 
the heart melts to it in a grateful tenderness for the wide, 
high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the joy of the 
flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you 
can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a 
sudden glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of 
pure joy, filling the soul to overflowing, wdiich the more 
scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England is in- 
capable of at least so instantly unparting. Our weather 
is of public largeness and universal apphcation, and 
is perhaps rather for the greatest good of the greatest 
number; admirable for the seed-time and harvest, and 
for the growing crops in the seasons between. The 
English weather is of a more private quality, and ap- 
portioned to the personal preference, or the personal 
endurance. It is as if it were influenced by the same 
genius which operates the whole of English hfe, and 
allows each to identify himself as the object of specific 
care, irrespective of the interests of the mass. This 
may be a little too fanciful, and I do not insist that it 
is scientific or even sociological. Yet I think the reader 
who rejects it might do worse than agree with me that 
the first impression of a foreign country visited or re- 
visited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the 
season. 

Nothing made me so much at home in England as 
reading, one day, that there was a lower or a higher 



LONDON FILMS 

pressure in a part of Scotland, just as I might have 
read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the 
lakes. "Now," I said to myself, "we shall have some- 
thing like real weather, the weather that is worth 
telegraphing ahead, and is going to be decisively this 
or that." But I could not see that the weather follow- 
ing differed from the weather we had been having. It 
was the same small, individual weather, offered as it 
were in samples of warm, cold, damp and dry, but 
mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day 
often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found 
that the sun was unobtrusively shining; then it rained, 
and there was rather a bitter wind; but presently it was 
sunny again, and you felt secure of the spring, for the 
birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark, the 
golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various 
finches; and round and over all the rooks were calling 
like voices in a dream. Full of this certainty of spring 
you went in-doors, and found it winter. 

If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very 
well, and that is why the Enghsh, who have been 
philosophizing their climate for a thousand and some 
odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go 
in-doors they take all the outer air they can with them, 
instinctively realizing that they will be more comfort- 
able w^ith it than in the atmosphere awaiting them. If 
their houses could be built reversible, so as to be turned 
inside out in some weathers, one would be very com- 
fortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that 
the English rain did not wet you, and he might have 
argued that the English cold would not chill you if 
only you staj^ed out-of-doors in it. 

Why will not travellers be honest with foreign coim- 
tries? Is it because they think they may some day 

^ 4 



METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 

come back? For my part, I am going to be heroic, and 
say that the in-doors cold in England is constant suffer- 
ing to the American born. It is not that there is no 
sizzling or crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing regis- 
ter; but that the grate in most of the houses that the 
traveller sees, the public-houses namely, seems to have 
shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Elxeter, 
for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral, 
one found a bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart 
pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm. I 
might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite 
the same of the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I 
pause before arriving at the grate of London, it is be- 
cause daring must stop somewhere. I think it is 
probable that the American, if he stayed long enough, 
would heed the injunction to suffer and be strong from 
the cold, as the Englishman has so largely done, but I 
am not sure. At one point of my devious progress to 
the capital I met an Englishman who had spent ten 
years in Canada, and who constrained me to a mild 
deprecation by the wrath with which he denounced the 
in-doors cold he had found everywhere at home. He 
said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years 
behind in such matters; and I could not deny that, 
even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the 
hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back 
behind one. To be warm all round in an English house 
is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds 
the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of 
draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find 
the window has been put down, but this is not merely to 
let in some of the outside warmth; it is also to make a 
current of air to the open door. Even if the window 
has not been put down, it has always so much play in its 

5 



LONDON FILMS 

frame, to allow for swelling from the damp, that in any- 
thing like dry weather the cold whistles round it, and 
you do not know which way to turn your mediaeval 
back. 

In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there 
were radiators, but not hot ones, and in a dining-room 
where they were hot the natives found them oppressive, 
while the foreigners were warming their fingers on the 
bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to 
pretend that the suffering they experience has not ap- 
parently resulted in the strength they see. Our con- 
temporary ancestors are a splendid-looking race, in the 
higher average, and if in the lower average they often 
look pinched and stunted, why, we are not ourselves 
giants without exception. The ancestral race does 
often look stunted and poor; persons of small build and 
stature abound; and nature is 

"So careful of the single type" 

of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the 
matter of complexion, if we count that a proof of health, 
we are quite out of it in comparison with the English, 
and beside them must look hke a nation of invalids. 
There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to 
afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not 
buy with us. I do not say the color does not look a 
little overdone in cases, or that the violent explosion of 
pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of small children, 
does not make one pause in question whether paste or 
putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to 
be too critical. Putty and paste, apart from association, 
are not pretty tints, and pinks and roses are; and the 
English children look not only fresher but sturdier and 

6 



METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 

healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do 
not know; but I doubt if the English live longer than 
we for living less comfortably. The lower classes seem 
always to have colds; the middle classes, rheumatism; 
and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears. Rheu- 
matism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not 
mind what one said) is universal in England, and all 
ranks of society have the facilities for it in the in-doors 
cold in which they otherwise often undeniably flourish. 
At the end, it is a question of whether you would rather 
be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the 
first course and they choose the last. 

If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the 
experience of the careful observer that there is a summit 
of healthful looks in England, which we do not touch 
in America, whatever the large table-land or foot-hill 
average we reach; and in like manner there is an ex- 
ceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it, 
rarely enough, in the London streets, which one never 
encounters with us. I am not envying the one, or at 
least not regretting the other. Distinction is the one 
thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too 
much; only, in America, we pay too much for too many 
other things to take any great comfort in our want of 
distinction. I own the truth without grief or shame, 
while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I 
enjoy other spectacles for which I cannot help letting 
the Enghsh pay too much. I was not appreciably the 
poorer myself , perhaps I was actually the richer, in 
seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the aristocratic 
region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an 
elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other 
on the pavement before me, and then went and came 
their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was 



LONDON FILMS 

passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I 
beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the 
tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, 
with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well- 
fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was 
nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various black. 
She looked not only authoritative; people often do that 
with us; she looked authorized; she had been empowered 
by the vested rights and interests to look so her whole 
life; one could not be mistaken in her, any more than 
in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the 
high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, hand- 
some houses where, in the cellary or sepulchral cold, 
she would presently resume the rheumatic pangs of 
which the comparative warmth of the outer air had 
momentarily relieved her stately bulk. 

But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of 
the English clime, they have all turned themselves into 
allures and delights. There have come three or four 
days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and mellow a 
warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with 
such soft masses of white clouds, that one wonders what 
there was ever to complain of. In the parks and in the 
gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves have grown 
perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can 
smell it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds in- 
sist, and in the air is that miraculous lift, as if nature, 
having had this banquet of the year long simmering, had 
suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with every 
gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have 
presently in the way of summer. From the delectable 
vision rises a subtile haze, which veils the day just a 
little from its own loveliness, and lies upon the sighing 
and expectant city like the substance of a dream made 

8 



METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 

visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this sub- 
stance yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or 
whisk by in your hansom, or rumble earthquakingly 
aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a 
part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful con- 
sciousness. It is flattering, but you feel like warn- 
ing him not to go in-doors, or he will lose you and 
all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know 
that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not 
be April there till well into June. 



II 

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS 

IT might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that 
there is no such thing as positive fact, but only- 
relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive perception 
of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only 
basis of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twen- 
tieth look at London I have been careful to keep about 
me a pocket vision of New York, so as to see what Lon- 
don is like by making constantly sure what it is not Uke. 
A pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same 
purpose. That is a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty 
obedient to a just municipal control, of a grandeur 
studied and authorized in proportion and relation to the 
design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly 
realized on lines nobly imagined. But New York and 
London may always be intelligibly compared because 
they are both the effect of an indefinite succession of 
anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and some- 
times promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one 
another. Each has been mainly built at the pleasure 
of the private person, with the community now and 
then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of 
house and home to the common advantage. Nothing 
but our racial illogicality has saved us from the effect 
of our racial anarchy in the social structure as well as the 
material structure, but if we could see London and 

10 



CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

New York as lawless in the one way as in the other, 
we should perhaps see how ugly they collectively are. 
The sum of such involuntary reflection with me 
has been the perception that London was and is and 
shall be, and New York is and shall be, but has hardly 
yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally, 
as she is one-third less numerically, than London.^ In 
her future she has no past, but only a present to retrieve; 
though perhaps a present like hers is enough. She is 
also one less architecturally than London; she is two- 
thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if 
I more closely examine my pocket vision, I am afraid 
that I must hedge from this modest claim, for we have 
as yet nothing to compare with at least a half of London 
magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen 
or eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her 
actual age. As we go fast in all things, we may then 
surpass her; but this is not certain, for in her more 
deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time 
the materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the 
pocket vision, seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn 
Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and some vast rocketing 
hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for the con- 
trast with those miles of imperial and municipal archi- 
tecture which in London make you forget the leagues 
of mean little houses, and remember the palaces, the 
law-courts, the great private mansions, the dignified and 
shapely flats, the large department stores, the immense 
hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind. 

One reason, I think, why London is so much more 
striking is in the unbroken line which the irregularly 
divided streets often present to the passer. Here is a 
chance for architecture to extend, while with us it has 
onlv a chance to tower, on the short up-town block 
^ XI 



LONDON FILMS 

which is the extreme dimension of om^ proudest edifice, 
pubUc or private. Another reason is in the London 
atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, 
while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly 
reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind 
on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight 
avenue which distracts you from the varied common- 
place of the commercial structures on either hand is the 
loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet 
Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm 
you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of 
the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the 
picturesque would choose, or may rather often have 
without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous 
smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, 
you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no 
other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens 
or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish- 
green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and 
the meaner houses render the rifts between more im- 
pressively chasmal. The tremendous volume of life 
that flows through the narrow and winding channels 
past the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks 
which the lesser buildings form, is such that the highest 
tide of Broadway or Fifth Avenue seems a scanty ebb 
beside it. The swelling and towering omnibuses, the 
huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous 
hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony- 
carts, donkey - carts, handcarts, and bicycles which 
fearlessly find their way amid the turmoil, with foot- 
passengers winding in and out, and covering the side- 
walks with their multitude, give the effect of a single 
monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the 
channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till 

12 



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CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a 
molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your 
umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public water- 
proof apron across your knees, and feel in supreme 
degree the insensate exultation of being part of the 
largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the 
universe. 

It is an emotion which supports the American visitor 
even against the immensity he shares, and he is able to 
reflect that New York would not look so relatively 
little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a capital 
on the same lines as London. If New York were, like 
London, a political as well as a commercial capital, she 
would have the national edifices of Washington added 
to the sky-scrapers in which she is now unrivalled,- and 
her competition would be architecturally much more 
formidable than it is. She would be the legislative 
centre of the different States of the Union, as London 
is of the different counties of the United Kingdom; she 
would have collected in her borders all their capitols 
and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, 
would valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one 
must now recoil on her behalf. She could not, of course, 
except on such rare days of fog as seem to greet Eng- 
lishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the 
adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; 
her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it 
shows larger than it is; no mist clothes the sky-scraper 
in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar into the 
clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the 
low buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. 
Nothing could be done in palliation of the comparative 
want of antiquity in New York, for the present, at 
least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment 

13 



LONDON FILMS 

of her destiny she will be one day as old as London 
now is. 

If one thinks, however, how old London now is, iv 
is rather crazing; much more crazing than the same 
sort of thought in the cities of lands more exclusively 
associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the 
present; there seems nothing above the past, or only 
so thin a layer of actuality that you have scarcely the 
sense of it. In England you remember with an effort 
Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and the 
long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English; 
the living interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense 
that you cannot penetrate them and consort quietly 
with the dead alone. Men whose names are in the di- 
rectory as well as men whose names are in history, 
keep you company, and push the shades of heroes, 
mart)Ts, saints, poets, and princes to the wall. They 
do not shoulder them willingly out of the way, but 
helplessly; there is no place in the w^orld where the 
material present is so reverently, so tenderly mindful 
of the material past. Perhaps, therefore, I felt safe in 
so largely leaving the English past to the English pres- 
ent, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger 
for the old which the new American brings with him to 
Europe, I now w^nt about enjoying the modern in its 
manifold aspects and possibly fancying characteristic 
traits where I did not find them. I did not care how 
trivial some of these w^ere, but I hesitate to confide 
to the more serious reader that I was at one moment 
much interested in what seemed the growing informal- 
ity of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in the streets 
and parks, or thought I noted it. 

To my vision, or any illusion, they wore every sort of 
careless cap, slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort 

14 



CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

of tunic, jacket, and cutaway. The top-hat and frock- 
coat still appear, but their combination is evidently no 
longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime 
functions. I do not mean to say that you do not 
often see that stately garment on persons of author- 
ity, but only that it is apparently not of the suprem- 
acy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the 
eighties and nineties of the last century. Certainly, 
when it comes to the artist at Truefitt's wearing a 
frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help 
asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, 
when one has said this, one must hedge from a con- 
jecture so extreme. The king wears a frock-coat, a 
long, gray one, with a white top -hat and lavender 
gloves, and those who like to be like a king conform to 
his taste. No one, upon his life, may yet wear a frock 
and a derby, but many people now wear top - hats, 
though black ones, with sack - coats, with any sort of 
coats; and, above all, the Londoner affects in summer a 
straw hat either of a flat top and a pasteboard stiffness, 
or of the operatically picturesque Alpine pattern, or of a 
slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often the 
derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of 
other nations has now become their pleasure, and, with 
the English genius of doing what they like, it may be 
that they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the 
effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The con- 
ventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but 
how long this will remain, who can say? The simple- 
hearted American, arriving with his scrupulous dress 
suit in London, may yet find himself going out to dinner 
with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets 
or tennis flannels. 
If, however, the men's dress in England is informal, 

15 



LONDON FILMS 

impatient, I think one will be well within the lines of 
safety in saying that above everything the English 
women's dress expresses sentiment, though I suppose it 
is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic 
of our women's dress is expressive of personal chic; 
in either case the dressmaker, male or female, has im- 
personally much to do with it. Under correction of 
those countrywomen of ours who will not allow that 
the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture 
to say that their expression of sentiment in dress is 
charming, but how charming it comparatively is I 
shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold 
as to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender 
fluency of youth than some realizations of the American 
ideal; and that after the azaleas and rhododendrons 
in the Park there is nothing in nature more suggestive 
of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes 
in which the wearers flow by the flowery expanses in 
carriage or on foot. The colors worn are often as coura- 
geous as the vegetable tints; the vaporous air softens 
and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told would 
shriek aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the 
shades worn tend to soft pallors, lavender, and pink, and 
creamy white. A group of girlish shapes in these colors, 
seen newly lighted at a doorway from a passing carriage, 
gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect 
of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am 
not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a 
scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an 
endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a by- 
gone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a 
graceful page, on many a glowing canvas. 

Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the 
word for the present dress of Englishwomen. It forms 

16 



CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

in itself a lovely picture to the eye, and is not merely 
the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is 
therefore the more difficult of transference to the 
imagination of the reader who has not also been a spec- 
tator, and before such a scene as one may witness in a 
certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after church 
in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening, 
the boldest kodak may well close its single eye in despair. 
As yet even the mental photograph cannot impart the 
tints of nature, and the reader who wishes to assist at 
this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself. 
At the right moment of the ripening London season the 
foliage of the trees is densely yet freshly green and 
flatteringly soft to the eye; the grass below has that 
closeness of texture which only English grass has the 
secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododen- 
drons and azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, 
and the drifted clouds in it are washed clean of their 
London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these beautiful 
women begin to appear about the time when you may 
have bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for 
that day. Some drift from the carriages that draw up 
on the drive beside the sacred close where they are to 
sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others 
glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles 
left afar, perhaps that they may give themselves the 
effect of coming informally. They arrive in twos and 
threes, young girls commonly with their mothers, but 
sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and 
with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, 
delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their 
gowns, always express sentiment, even when they can- 
not always express simplicity; and the just observer is 
obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if 

17 



LONDON FILMS 

not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very 
great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of 
feature which is able to be patrician without being 
unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do 
not carry themselves well, it takes an American woman 
to see it. They move naturally and lightly — that is, 
the young girls do; mothers in England, as elsewhere, 
are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are 
as handsome in their well-wearing English way as their 
daughters. 

Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron 
barriers, and in one of these the arriving groups of au- 
thorized people found other people of their kind, where 
the unauthorized people seemed by common consent 
to leave them. There was especially one enclosure 
which seemed consecrated to the highest comers ; it was 
not necessary that they should make the others feel 
they were not wanted there; the others felt it of them- 
selves, and did not attempt to enter that especial isary 
ring, or fairy triangle. Those within looked as much 
at home as if in their own drawing-rooms, and after the 
usual greetings of friends sat down in their penny chairs 
for the talk which the present kodak would not have 
overheard if it could. 

If any one were to ask me how I knew that these 
beautiful creatures were of supreme social value, I 
should be obliged to own that it was largely an assump- 
tion based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch person- 
ally in the matter they might have been women come 
to see the women who had not come. Still, if the effects 
of high breeding are visible, then they were the sort 
they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old 
and young, had the aristocratic air which is not aggres- 
sive, the patrician bearing which is passive and not 

18 




THE CARRIAGES DRAWN UP BESIDE THE SACRED CLOSE 



CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

active, and which in the Enghsh seems consistent with 
so much that is human and kindly. There is always 
the question whether this sort of game is worth the 
candle; but that is a moral consideration which would 
take me too far from the little scene I am trying to sug- 
gest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the 
English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene 
was the constant movement of distinguished figures 
within the sacred close, and up and down the paths 
past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The 
distinguished figures were apparently not the least 
molested by the multiplied and concentrated gazes of 
the on-lookers, who were, as it were, outside the window, 
and of the street. What struck one accustomed to the 
heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where 
any such scene would be so inexpressibly impossible, 
was the almost wholly English personnel of the crowd 
within and without the sacred close. Here and there 
a Continental presence, French or German or Italian, 
pronounced its nationality in dress and bearing; one of 
the many dark subject races of Great Britain was repre- 
sented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black hair and 
eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various 
colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves one 
was aware of some other Americans. But these ex- 
ceptions only accented the absolutely English domi- 
nance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less 
evident in the observed than in the observers, where, 
beyond the barrier, which there was nothing to prevent 
their passing, they sat in passive rows, in passive pairs, 
in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers 
were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the 
hands folded on the top of the stick express a pause 
in the emotions and the energies which has its pathos. 

19 



LONDON FILMS 

There were women among them, of course, but the 
women were also of the age when the keener sensibiUties 
are taking a rest; and such aliens of their sex as qualified 
the purely English nature of the affair lost whatever 
was aggressive in their difference. 

It was necessary to the transaction of the drama 
that from time to time the agents of the penny-chair 
company should go about in the close and collect money 
for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly 
solved, how the ladies who had com.e unattended man- 
aged, with their pocketless dresses, to carry coins un- 
equalled in bulk since the iron currency of Sparta; or 
whether they held the pennies frankly in their hands 
till they paid them away. In England the situation, 
if it is really the situation, is always accepted with im- 
pUcit confidence, and if it had been the custom to bring 
pennies in their hands, these ladies would have no 
more minded doing it than they minded being looked 
at by people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate 
superiority. 

With us the public affirmation of class, if it were 
imaginable, could not be imaginable except upon the 
terms of a mutinous protest in the spectators which 
would not have been less real for being silent. But 
again I say the thing would not have been possible with 
us in New York; though in Newport, where the aristo- 
cratic tradition is said to have been successfully trans- 
planted to our plutocratic soil, something analogous 
might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that tradi- 
tion does not come to flower in the open American air; 
it is potted and grown under glass; and can be carried 
out-doors only under special conditions. The American 
must still come to England for the realization of certain 
social ideals towards which we may be now straining, but 

20 



CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS 

which do not yet enjoy general acceptance. The reader 
who knows New York has but to try and fancy its best, 
or even its better, society dispersing itself on certain 
grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or after- 
noon; or, on some week-day evening, leaving its equipages 
along the drives and strolling out over the herbage; or 
receiving in its carriages the greetings of acquaintance 
who make their way in and out among the wheels. 
PoUce and populace would join forces in their several 
sorts to spoil a spectacle which in Hyde Park appeals, 
in high degree, to the aesthetic sense, and which might 
stimulate the historic imagination to feats of agreeable 
invention if one had that sort of imagination. 

The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society 
which we have not yet lived long enough to have known, 
and which we very probably never shall know. Such 
civilization as we have will continue to be pubHc and 
impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its 
specific events will remain within walls. It could not 
manifest itself outside without being questioned, chal- 
lenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear 
reasons why it is well so. 



Ill 

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

WE are quite as domestic as the English, but with 
us the family is of the personal life, while with 
them it is of the general life, so that when their domes- 
ticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one 
feels it strange. One has read of something like this 
without the sense of it which constantly penetrates one 
in London. One must come to England in order to 
realize from countless little occasions, little experiences, 
how entirely Enghsh life, public as well as private, 
is an affair of family. We know from our reading how 
a comparatively few families administer, if they do not 
govern, but we have still to learn how the other families 
are apparently content to share the form in which au- 
thority resides, since they cannot share the authority. 
At the very top — I offer the conjecture towards the 
solution of that mystery which constantly bewilders 
the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty — is, of 
course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the 
American is that it is revered because it is the royal 
family. But possibly a truer interpretation of the fact 
would be that it is dear and sacred to the vaster British 
public because it is the royal family. A bachelor king 
could hardly dominate the English imagination like a 
royal husband and father, even if his being a husband 
and father were not one of the implications of that tacit 

22 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

Constitution in whose silence English power resides. 
With us, family has less and less to do with society, 
even; but with the English it has more and more to do, 
since the royal family is practically without political 
power, and not only may, but almost must, devote 
itself to society. It goes and com.es on visits to other 
principalities and powers; it opens parhaments; it lays 
corner-stones and presides at the dedication of edifices 
of varied purpose ; it receives deputations and listens to 
addresses; it holds courts and levees; it reviews regi- 
ments and fleets, and assists at charity entertainments 
and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races; 
it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalt- 
ed presences for their prosperity. These events seem 
public, and if they were imaginable of a democracy 
like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order 
of English things they are social, they are domestic, 
they are from one family to every other family directly 
or indirectly; the king is for these ends not more a 
royalty than the rest of his family, and for the most 
part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts 
are few. Things that in a repubhc are entirely personal, 
as marriages, births, christenings, deaths, and burials, 
whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect 
royalty, of public and national concern, and it would 
not be 'easy to show how one royal act differed from 
another in greater or less publicity. 

If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a wilhng- 
ness to generalize from wholly insufficient grounds, and 
take the chances of hitting or missing, you might affirm 
a domestic simplicity of feeling in some phases of func- 
tions exalted far beyond the range of republican experi- 
ences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence 
which we sometimes have cabled to our press at home, 

23 



LONDON FILMS 

by more than usually ardent enterprise, one may have 
read that the king held a levee at St. James's; and one 
conceived of it as something dramatic, something his- 
toric, something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one 
happened to be walking in Pall Mall on the morning of 
that levee, one saw merely a sort of irregular coming 
and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as regarded 
the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. 
A thin fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly by- 
standers lined the curbstone, and looked at the people 
arriving in the carriages, victorias, hansoms, and four- 
wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered dignitaries 
of the church; and military and naval officers made their 
way through the fringe and crossed the street among 
the wheels and horses. No one concerned seemed to 
feel anything odd in the effect, though to the unwonted 
American the sight of a dignitary in full canonicals or 
regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is 
not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by ro- 
mance. At one moment a middle-aged lady in the line 
of vehicles put her person well out of the window of her 
four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her 
driver in something. She may not have been going 
to the levee, but one felt that if she had been she 
would still have done what it abashed the alien to 
see. 

We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English 
in matters of English state ; we, who have no state at all 
require them to live up to theirs, just as quite plain, el- 
derly observers expect every woman to be young and 
pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly 
the secret of enduring so much state as the English 
have lies in knowing how and when to shirk it, to drop 
it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon this fact, 

24 




SUNDAY AFTERNOON, HYDE PARK 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

if it is a fact, would find bis knuckles warningly rapped 
when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed 
empty of etiquette. But the rapping would be very 
gentle, very kindly, for this is the genius of English rule 
where it is not concerned with criminal offence. You 
must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but 
you are "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden 
in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is 
again the difference between the social and the public, 
which is perhaps the main difference between an oli- 
garchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more 
spared in the one and the self-respect in the other, 
though this is saying it too loosely, and may not be say- 
ing it truly; it is only a conjecture with which I am par- 
leying while I am getting round to add that such part 
of the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was 
vastly more of it, was much less filling to the imagination 
than a glimpse which I had of a court one night. I am 
rather proud of being able to explain that the late 
queen held court in the early afternoon and the present 
king holds court at night; but, lest any envious reader 
suspect me of knowing the fact at first-hand, I hasten 
to say that the glimpse I had of the function that night 
only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving 
out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human, 
through a thin rain, the blood-red figures of the coach- 
men and footmen gowned from head to foot in their 
ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of 
the coach between them, and the horses trampling 
heraldically before out of the legendary past. The 
want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly 
blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so su- 
preme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague 
splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab 

25 



LONDON FILMS 

flashed by them, moving in a slow hne towards the front 
of Buckingham Palace. 

The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of 
which would enrich my page beyond the dreams of 
fiction, and it is said that in the time of the one-o'clock 
court they used to receive a full share of the attention 
which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow. 
They were often halted, as that night I saw them 
halting, in their progress, and this favored the plebeian 
witnesses, who ranged along their course and invited 
themselves and one another to a study of the looks 
and dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both. 
The study and the comment must have had their limits; 
the observed knew how much to bear if the observers 
did not know how little to forbear; and it is not probable 
that the London spectators went the lengths which 
our outsiders go in trying to verify an English duke 
who is about to marry an American heiress. The Lon- 
don vulgar, if not better bred than our vulgar, are better 
fed on the sight of social grandeur, and have not a life- 
long famine to satisfy, as ours have. Besides, whatever 
gulf birth and wealth have fixed between the English 
classes, it is mystically bridged by that sentiment of 
family which I have imagined the ruling influence in 
England. In a country where equality has been glori- 
fied as it has been in ours, the contrast of conditions 
must breed a bitterness in those of a lower condition 
which is not in their hearts there; or if it is, the alien 
does not know it. 

What seems certain is the interest with which every 
outward manifestation of royal and social state is fol- 
lowed, and the leisure which the poor have for a vicari- 
ous indulgence in its luxuries and splendors. One 
would say that there was a large leisure class entirely 

26 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

devoted to these pleasures, which cost it nothing, but 
which may have palled on the taste of those who pay 
for them. Of course, something like this is the case 
in every great city; but in London, where society is 
enlarged to the bounds of the national interests, the 
demand of such a leisure class might very well be sup- 
posed to have created the supply. Throughout the 
London season, and measurably throughout the London 
year, there is an incessant appeal to the curiosity of the 
common people which is never made in vain. Some- 
where a drum is throbbing or a bugle sounding from 
dawn till dusk; the red coat is always passing singly or 
in battalions, afoot or on horseback; the tall bear-skin 
cap weighs upon the grenadier's brow, 

"And the hapless soldier's sigh," 

if it does not ^^run in blood down palace walls," must 
often exhale from lips tremulous with hushed profanity. 
One bright, hot morning of mid-July the suffering from 
that cruel folly in the men of a regiment marching from 
their barracks to Buckingham Palace and sweltering 
under those shaggy cliffs was evident in their distorted 
eyes, streaming cheeks, and panting mouths. But why 
do I select the bear-skin cap as peculiarly cruel and 
foolish, merely because it is archaic? All war and all 
the images of it are cruel and foolish. 

The April morning, however, when I first carried out 
my sensitized surfaces for the impression which I hoped 
to receive from a certain historic spectacle was very 
different. There was even a suggestion of comfort in 
'^the archaic bear-skins; they were worn, and they had 
been worn, every day for nearly two hundred years, as 
part of the ceremonial of changing the regimental 

27 



LONDON FILMS 

colors before Buckingham Palace. I will not be asked 
why this is imperative; it has always been done and 
probably always will be done, and to most civilian on- 
lookers will remain as unintelligible in detail as it was 
to me. When the regiment was drawn up under the 
palace windows, a part detached itself from the main 
body and went off to a gate of the palace, and continued 
mysteriously stationary there. In the mean time the 
ranks left behind closed or separated amid the shouting 
of sergeants or corporals, and the men relieved them- 
selves of the strain from their knapsacks, or satisfied 
an exacting military ideal, by hopping at will into the 
air and bouncing their knapsacks, dragging lower 
down, up to the napes of their necks, where they rested 
under the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A 
couple of officers, with swords drawn, walked up and 
down behind the ranks, but, though they were tall, 
fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment 
of their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give 
the scene any such poignant interest as it had from the 
men in performing a duty, or indulging a privilege, by 
hopping into the air and bouncing their knapsacks up 
to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable 
delay, but was doubtless requisite for the transaction, 
the detachment sent for the change of colors returned 
with the proper standards. The historic rite was then 
completed, the troops formed in order, and marched 
back to their barracks to the exultant strains of their 
band. 

The crowd outside the palace yard, which this daily 
sight attracts, dispersed reluctantly, its particles doubt- 
less holding themselves ready to reassemble at the 
slightest notice. It formed a small portion only of the 
population of London which has volunteer charge of 

28 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

the goings and comings at Buckingham Palace, Cer- 
tain of its members are on guard there from morning 
till night, and probably no detail of ceremony escapes 
their vigilance. If asked what they are expecting to 
see, they are not able to say; they only know that they 
are there to see what happens. They make the most 
of any carriage entering or issuing from the yard; they 
note the rare civihans who leave or approach the palace 
door on foot, the half-dozen plain policemen who stand 
at their appointed places within the barrier which none 
of the crowd ever dreams of passing must share its in- 
terest. Neither these policemen nor the sentries who 
pace their beat before the high iron fence are ap- 
parently willing to molest the representatives of the 
public interest. On the April morning in case, during 
the momentary absence of the policeman who should 
have restrained the crowd, the sentry found himself 
embarrassed by a spectator who had intruded on his 
beat. He faltered, blushing as well as he could through 
his high English color, and then said, gently, " A little 
back, please," and the intruder begged pardon and 
retired. 

In the simple incident there was nothing of the ner- 
vousness observable in either the official or the offi- 
cious repositories of the nationality which one sees in 
Continental countries, and especially in Germany. It 
was plain that England, though a military power, is 
not militarized. The English shows of force are civil. 
Nowhere but in England does the European hand of iron 
wear the glove of velvet. There is always an English 
war going on somewhere, but one does not relate to it 
the kindly-looking young fellows whom one sees suffer- 
ing under their bear-skin caps in the ranks, or loitering at 
liberty in the parks, and courting the flattered girls 

29 



LONDON FILMS 

who flutter like moths about the flame of their red 
jackets, up and down the paths and on the pubUc . 
benches. The soldiers are under the law of military 
obedience, and are so far in slavery, as all soldiers are, 
but nothing of their slavery is visible, and they are the 
idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the pict- 
uresqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great 
London spectacle. It is said that they sometimes 
abuse their apparent supremacy, and that their uniform 
generally bars them from places of amusement; but one 
sees nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the 
public ways, where one sometimes sees them pushing 
baby-carriages to free the nurse-maids to more unre- 
stricted flirtation, or straying over the grass and under 
the trees with maids who are not burdened by any 
sort of present duty. 

After all, as compared with the civilians, they are 
few even in that game of love which is always playing 
itself wherever youth meets youth, and which in London 
is only evident in proportion to the vastness of the 
city. Their individual life is, like that of the royalty 
which they decorate, public more than private, and one 
can scarcely dissociate them, with all their personal 
humility, from the exalted figures whose eminence 
they directly or indirectly contribute to throw into 
relief. I do not mean that they are seen much or little 
in the king's company. The English king, though he 
wears many land and sea uniforms, is essentially civilian, 
and though vast numbers of soldiers exist for his state 
in London, they do not obviously attend him, except 
on occasions of the very highest state. I make this 
observation rather hazardously, for the fact, which I 
feel bound to share with the reader, is that I never saw 
in London any of the royalties who so abound there. 

30 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

I did, indeed, see the king before I left England, but it 
was in a place far from his capital, and the king was the 
only one of his large family I saw anywhere. I hope 
this will not greatly disappoint my readers, especially 
such as have scruples against royalties; but it is best 
to be honest. I can be quite as honest in adding that 
I had always a vague, underlying curiosity concerning 
royalty, and a hope that it would somehow come my 
way, but it never did, to my knowledge, and somehow, 
with the best will towards it, I never went its way. 
This I now think rather stupid, for every day the morn- 
ing papers predicted the movements of royalty, which 
seemed to be in perpetual movement, so that it must 
have been by chance that I never saw it arriving or 
departing at the stations where I was often doing the 
same. 

Of course, no private person, not even the greatest 
nobleman, let alone the passing stranger, can possibly 
arrive and depart so much as the king and queen, and 
their many children, grandchildren, nephews, and 
nieces, and cousins of every remove. For the sover- 
eigns themselves this incessant motion, though mitigated 
by every device of loyal afTection and devotion on the 
part of their subjects, must be a great hardship, and 
greater as they get into years. The king's formal 
office is simply to reign, but one wonders when he finds 
the time for reigning. He seems to be always setting 
out for Germany or Denmark or France, when he is not 
coming from Wales or Scotland or Ireland; and, when 
quietly at home in England, he is constantly away 
on visits to the houses of favored subjects, shooting 
pheasants or grouse or deer; or he is going from one 
horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden- 
party or whatever corresponds in England to a church 

31 



LONDON FILMS 

sociable. It is impossible to enumerate the pleasures 
which must poison his life, as if the cares were not 
enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much 
liked and is so amiable and active, the perpetual move- 
ment affects the plebeian foreigner as something terri- 
ble. Never to be quiet; never to have a stretch of those 
long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to 
later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample 
strange cookeries; to sleep under a different preacher 
every Sunday, and in a different bed every night; to 
wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions, 
three or four times a day; to receive every manner of 
deputation, and try to show an interest in every manner 
of object — who would reign on such terms as these, if 
there were any choice of not reigning? 

Evidently such a career cannot be managed without 
the help, the pretty constant help, of armed men; and 
the movement of troops in London from one point to 
another is one of the evidences of state which is so 
little static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, 
and makes one wish one were a child that one might 
fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement of a great 
mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a 
flaming squad, or a single vidette spurring on some 
swift errand, with his pennoned lance erect from his 
toe and his horse-hair crest streaming behind him. The 
soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of civil 
life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spec- 
tator as they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme 
attraction in their sort for the newly arrived American 
is the pair of statuesque warriors who motionlessly sit 
their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse-Guards, 
and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they 
were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's 

32 



SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 

shop. When I first arrived in London in the earhest 
of those sad eighteen-sixties when our Enghsh brethren 
were equipping our Confederate brethren to sweep our 
commerce from the seas, I think I must have gone to 
see those images at the Horse-Guards even before I 
visited the monuments in West^vrister Abbey, and they 
then perfectly filled my vast expectation; they might 
have been Gog and Magog, for their gigantic stature. 
In after visits, though I had a sneaking desire to see 
them again, I somehow could not find their place, 
being ashamed to ask for it, in my hope of happening 
on it, and I had formed the notion, which I confidently 
urged, that they had been taken down, like the Welling- 
ton statue from the arch. But the other day (or month, 
rather), when I was looking for Whitehall, suddenly 
there they were again, sitting their horses in the gate- 
ways as of yore, and as woodenly as if they had never 
stirred since 1861. They were unchanged in attitude, 
but how changed they were in person: so dwarfed, so 
shrunken, as if the intervening years had sapped the 
juices of their joints and let their bones fall together, 
like those of withered old men! 

This was, of course, the unjust effect of my original 
exaggeration of their length and breadth. The troops 
that I saw marching through the streets where we first 
lodged were fine, large men. I myself saw no choice 
in the different bodies, but the httle housemaid much 
preferred the grenadier guards to the Scotch guards; 
perhaps there was one grenadier guard who lent beauty 
and grandeur to the rest. I think Scotch caps are much 
gayer than those busbies which the grenadiers wear, 
but that, again, is a matter of taste; I certainly did 
not think the plaid pantaloons with which the Scotch 
guards hid the knees that ought to have been naked 

33 



LONDON FILMS 

were as good as the plain trousers of their rivals. But 
they were all well enough, and the officers who saun- 
tered along out of step on the sidewalk, or stoop-shoul- 
deredly, as the English military fashion now is, followed 
the troops on horseback, were splendid fellows, who 
would go to battle as simply as to afternoon tea, and 
get themselves shot in some imperial cause as imper- 
sonally as their men. 

There were large barracks in our neighborhood where 
one might have glimpses of the intimate life of the 
troops, such as shirt-sleeved figures smoking short pipes 
at the windows, or red coats hanging from the sills, or 
sometimes a stately bear-skin dangling from a shutter 
by its throat-latch. We were also near to the Chelsea 
Hospital, where soldiering had come to its last word in 
the old pensioners pottering about the garden-paths or 
sitting in the shade or sun. Wherever a red coat ap- 
peared it had its honorable obsequy in the popular in- 
terest, and if I might venture to sum up my impres- 
sion of what I saw of soldiering in London I should 
say that it keeps its romance for the spectator far more 
than soldiering does in the Continental capitals, where 
it seems a slavery consciously sad and clearly discerned. 
It may be that a glamour clings to the English soldier be- 
cause he has voluntarily enslaved himself as a recruit, 
and has not been torn an unwilling captive from his 
home and work, like the conscripts of other countries. 
On the same terms our own military are romantic. 



IV 
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

I HAD thought — rather cheaply, as I now reaUze — of 
offering, as a pendant for the scene of Fashion Meet- 
ing Itself in the Park on the Sunday noons and after- 
noons which I have tried to photograph, some picture of 
open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have 
decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be 
found any week-day evening, when the weather is fair, 
on the grassy stretches which the Park rises into some- 
what beyond the sacred close of high life. This space 
is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is 
higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion 
as embowering foliage gives. There are no trees on 
any side for many acres, and the golden-red sunset 
glow^ hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the 
low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of 
one sultry day which I have in mind. From all the 
paths leading up out of Piccadilly there was a streaming 
tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly turfed, 
and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes 
which a more impassioned imagination than mine 
might figure as the dead and wounded in some field 
of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides having 
no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a 
conscience against its unreality. Those people, mostly 
young people, are either sitting there in gossiping groups, 

35 



LONDON FILMS 

or whispering pairs, or singly breathing a mute rapture 
of release from the day's work. A young fellow lies 
stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above 
the newspaper which the lingering light allows him to 
read; another has an open book under his eyes; but 
commonly each has the companionship of some fearless 
girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which 
with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands 
beside the sea, but which is here without that extreme 
effect which the bathing-costume imparts on our beaches. 
These young people stretched side by side on th^ grass 
in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a 
suggestion of the 

''Bella eta dell' oro " 

not to be had elsewhere in our iron civilization. One 
might accuse their taste, but certainly they were more 
interesting than the rows of young men perched on the 
top course of the fence, in a wide variety of straw hats, 
or even than the red-coated soldiers who boldly occupied 
the penny chairs along the walks and enjoyed each the 
vigorous rivalry of girls w^orshipping him on either hand. 
They boldly occupied the penny chairs, for the 
danger that they would be made to pay was small. 
The sole collector, a man well in years and of a benevo- 
lent reluctance, passed casually among the rows of 
seats, and took pennies only from those who could most 
clearly afford it. There was a fence round a pavilion 
where a band was playing, and within there were spend- 
thrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the 
music could be perfectly well heard without charge out- 
side. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience 
of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in 
numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicy- 

36 



THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

cling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed 
a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long after- 
glow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began 
to pierce the clear heavens. But there was always 
enough kindly obscurity to hide emotions that did not 
mind being seen, and to soften the details which could 
not be called beautiful. As the dark deepened, the 
prone shapes scattered by hundreds over the grass looked 
like peaceful flocks whose repose was not disturbed by 
the human voices or by the human feet that incessantly 
went and came on the paths. It was a touch, however 
illusory, of the rusticity which lingers in so many sorts 
at the heart of the immense city, and renders it at un- 
expected moments simple and homelike above all other 
cities. 

The evening when this London pastoral offered itself 
was the close of a day of almost American heat. The 
mercury never went above eighty-three degrees, but 
the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think 
a good deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye 
from the lurid horizons paling upward into the dull, 
unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily overcast or 
heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came 
also from the thronged streets, in which the season had 
scarcely begun to waver, and the pulses of the plethoric 
town throbbed with a sense of choking fulness. The 
feverish activity of the cabs contributed to the effect of 
the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated 
themselves into every crevice of the frequent "blocks," 
where the populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their 
arrest of the artificial movement of air, sweltered in the 
sun, and the classes in private carriages of every order 
and degree suffered in a helpless equality with the per- 
spiring masses. 

37 



LONDON FILMS 

Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of 
straw hats; and where one lately saw only the variance 
from silken cylinders to the different types of derbies 
and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape of 
panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence 
of the low, flat - topped hard - brimmed things that 
mocked with the rigidity of sheet-iron the conception 
of straw as a light and yielding material. Men with as 
yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember 
when the American picked himself out in the London 
crowd by his summer hat, but now, in his belated con- 
formity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt to be one of 
the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming 
processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No 
shape of straw hat is peculiar to any class, but the 
slouching panama is for pecuniary reasons more the 
wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in 
front and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater 
acceptance with youth; age and middle -age wear its 
weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora form; and now 
and then one saw the venerable convention of the cock- 
aded footman's and coachman's silk hat mocked in 
straw. No concession more extreme could be made to 
the heat, and these strange cylinders, together with the 
linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the 
excesses in which the English are apt to indulge their 
common -sense when they decide to give way to it. 
They have apparently decided to give way to it in 
the dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park, 
where individual caprice is the sole law that obtains 
amid a general anarchy. 

The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and sug- 
gests the daring thought that, if ever their race decides 
to get on without government of any sort, they will rid 

38 



THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

themselves of it with a thoroughness and swiftness past 
the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with 
all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have 
discarded the traditional costumes of Rotten Row. 
The young girls and young men in flapping panamas, 
in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave cer- 
tainly an agreeable livehness to the spectacle, which 
their elders emulated by expressions of taste as person- 
al and unconventional. A lady in the old-fashioned 
riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating veil 
recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to 
lose weight, in a brief emergence from the past to which 
she belonged. One man similarly hatted, but frock- 
coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy of note; but 
no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as 
distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so 
much to the sense of liberation from the heat as the 
others who, when it reached its height, frankly confessed 
its power by riding in greatly diminished numbers. By 
twelve o'clock scarcely one left of all those joyous 
youths, those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy 
children, matched in size with their ponies, as the elders 
were in their different mounts, remains to distract the 
eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs 
and the promenaders between them. 

It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting 
show of what seemed society at home than the Sunday- 
afternoon reception in the consecrated closes on the 
grass. People who knew one another stopped and 
gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and 
tried to ignore them. But that could not have been 
easy. The women whom those handsome, aristocratic 
men bowed over, or dropped into chairs beside, or 
saluted as they went by, were very beautiful women, 



LONDON FILMS 

and dressed with that sentiment which has already been 
celebrated. Their draperies fluttered in the gay breeze 
which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them with 
tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the Hfe 
of a picture to be seen nowhere else. It was not neces- 
sary to know just who, or just of what quality they 
were, in order to reaHze their loveliness. 

Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had 
still something of its early summer freshness; but in its 
farther stretches it was of our August brown, and in 
certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The trees 
themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and 
the wind blew showers of yellowing leaves from their 
drooping boughs. Towards the close of the season, on 
the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of those conse- 
crated social closes, to which I am always returning 
with a snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance 
of the great weary army which would possess the pleas- 
ure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers had left it. 
Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had 
cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there, 
with their faces in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy 
heaps and coils where the delicate foot of fashion had 
pressed the green herbage. As among the spectators 
I thought I noted an increasing number of my country- 
men and women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied 
more and more of them in the hired turnouts which 
cannot long keep their secret from the critical eye. 
These were as obvious to conjecture as some other 
turnouts, which I fancied of a decayed ancestrality : 
cumbrous landaus and victorias, with rubberless tires, 
which grumbled and grieved in their course for the 
passati tempi, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the 
parvenu carriages, and for all the types of motors which 

40 



THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

more and more invade the drives of the Park. They 
had a Uterary quahty, and were out of Thackeray and 
Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society noveUsts 
great enough for them to be out of. 

If such novehsts had not been wanting I am sure I 
should not be left with the problem of an extremely 
pretty and charming woman whose scarf one morning 
so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside 
another extremely pretty and charming woman, that 
he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, 
who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she 
in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly 
equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, 
would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic 
meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down 
the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, ex- 
quisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in 
a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would 
fix even the exact social value of that companion of a 
lady stopped in chat by that other lady, who was always 
hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance. 
The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor w^as 
she now made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx- 
patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid of story 
could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little 
foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her 
drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and 
scornful in her relation to the encounter from which 
she remained excluded? The lady who had left her 
standing rejoined her and they drifted off together 
into the vast of the unfathomed, but not, I like to 
believe, the unfathomable. 

When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course 
it did not break. That would have been a violence of 

41 



LONDON FILMS 

which EngUsh weather would not have been capable. 
There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a trap 
were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It 
softly gave way in a gradual, delicious coolness, which 
again mellowed at the edges, as it were, and dissolved 
in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain might 
finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the 
"anguish of the solstice," as we had felt it in London, 
and by the time the first shower insinuated itself we 
were in the heart of the Malvern Hills. 

Of course, this heated term was not as the heated 
terms of New York are ; but it excelled them in length, 
if not in breadth and thickness. The nights were al- 
ways cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights 
do not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would 
have been unendurable, but in London one woke each 
morning with renewed hope and renewed strength. 
Very likely there were parts of London where people 
despaired and weakened through the night, but in these 
polite perspectives I am trying to exclude such places; 
and whenever I say "one" in this relation, I am imagin- 
ing one of the many Americans who witness the London 
season perhaps oftener from the outside than the inside, 
but who still can appreciate and revere its facts. 

The season was said to begin very late, and it was 
said to be a very "bad" season, throughout May, when 
the charges of those who live by it ordinarily feel an 
expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become difficult, 
become impossible; when the rents of apartments 
double themselves, and apartments are often not to be 
had at any price; when the face of the cabman clouds 
if you say you want him by the hour, and clears if you 
add that you will make it all right with him; when 
every form of service begins to have the courage of its 

42 



THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

dependence; and the manifold fees which ease the 
social machine seem to lubricate it so much less than 
the same fees in April; when the whole vast body of 
London groans with a sense of repletion such as no 
American city knows except in the rare congestion pro- 
duced by a universal exposition or a national conven- 
tion. Such a congestion is of annual occurrence in 
London, and is the symptomatic expression of the sea- 
son; but the symptoms ordinarily recognizable in May 
were absent until June in the actual year. They were 
said to have been suppressed by the reluctance of the 
tardy spring, and again by the king's visit to Ireland. 
As the king is the fountain of social prosperity it is 
probable that he had more to do with delaying the sea- 
son than the weather had; but by what one hears said 
of him he would not have willingly delayed it. He is 
not only a well-meaning and well-doing prince, one 
hears from people of every opinion, but a promoter of 
peace and international concord (especially with France, 
where his good offices are believed to have been pe- 
culiarly effective), and he is, rather more expectedly, 
a cheerful sovereign, loving the gayety as well as the 
splendor of state, and fond of seeing the world enjoy 

itself. ^ ^ ^ , 

It is no betrayal of the national confidence to repeat 
what every one says concerning the present outburst 
of fashion, that it is a glad compliance with the kmg's 
liking; the more eager because of its long suppression 
during the late queen's reign and the more anxious 
because of a pathetic apprehension inspired by the well- 
known serious temperament of the heir-apparent to 
the throne. No doubt the joyful rebound from the 
depression of the Boer war is also still felt; but for 
whatever reason London life is gay and glad, it is cer- 

43 



LONDON FILMS 

tainly making its hay while the sun shines, and it mixes 
as many poppies and daisies with the crop as possible 
against the time when only grass may be acceptable. In 
other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in 
the masses as well as the classes is the inspiration of the 
court, while the free personal preferences expressed are 
probably the effect of that strong, that headstrong, in- 
stinct of being like one's self, whether one is like others 
or not, which has always moulded precedence and tra- 
dition to individual convenience with the English. 
One would not have said that a frock-coat of lustrous 
black alpaca was just the wear for a tall middle-aged 
gentleman in a silk hat and other scrupulous appoint- 
ments; but when he appeared in it one hottest Sunday 
afternoon in that consecrated close of Hyde Park, and 
was welcomed by the inmost flower-group of the gor- 
geous parterre, one had to own a force of logic in 
it. If a frock-coat was the proper thing for the occa- 
sion in general, then the lightest and coolest fabric 
was the thing for that occasion in particular. So the 
wearer had reasoned in sublime self-reliance, and 
so, probably, the others reasoned in intelligent acqui- 
escence. 

Just what quality he had the courage of one could 
not have guessed at a distance, and he must remain 
part of the immense question which London continues 
for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that he 
looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type 
of man looked undistinguished, but when the season 
began to make London over, the pavement of Piccadilly 
sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking. 
They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty 
of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature. 
, They were doubtless the result of a natural selection, to 

44 



THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 

which money for buying perfect conditions had con- 
tributed as much as the time necessary for growing a 
type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only 
now and then hard or cruel; but one need not be espe- 
cially averse to the English classification of our species 
to feel that they had cost more than they were worth. 
The very handsomest man I saw, with the most per- 
fectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicate- 
ly aquiUne to be particularly patrician), was a groom 
who sat his horse beside Rotten Row, waiting till his 
master should come to command the services of both. 
He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not 
be said that he had cost the nation too much time and 
money, it might still be conjectured that he had cost 
some one too much of something better. 

Next after these beautiful people I think that in the 
multitudinously varied crowd of London I saw no men 
so splendidly, so brilliantly, so lustrously handsome as 
three of those imperial British whose lives are safer, 
but whose social status is scarcely better than that of our 
negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native 
dress, and white-turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who 
suddenly filed out of the crowd, looking more mystery 
from their liquid eyes than they could well have cor- 
roborated in word or thought, and bringing to the 
metropolis of the West the gorgeous and foolish mag- 
nificence of the sensuous East. What did they make 
of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or with- 
out rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferi- 
ority in the imperial scheme? If looks went for what 
looks rarely do, except in women, they should have 
been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were 
simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races 
which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under 

45 



LONDON FILMS 

British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this 
home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or 
memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and 
then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the 
crowd. 



V 

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS 

THE specialization of those fatuous Orientals, tran- 
sient as it was, was of far greater duration than 
that of most individual impressions from the London 
crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a power- 
ful light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific 
wavelet ; but these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred 
record with the most instantaneous apparatus. What 
remains of the vision of that long succession of streets 
called by successive names from Knightsbridge to Lud- 
gate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you 
are scarcely more aware of the single life than of any 
given ripple in a river. Men, women, children form 
the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in order 
to give it the collective immensity which abides in your 
mind's eye. 
. To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is 
archaic. Except for the few slow stages that lumber 
up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly anything of 
the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of 
our continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment 
and amusement that one finds it still prevailing in 
London, quite as if it were not as gross an anachronism 
as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and 
bewilderingly painted over with the names of its desti- 
nations, and clad with signs of patent medicines and 
new plays and breakfast foods in every color but the 

47 



LONDON FILMS 

colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it rumbles 
forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a 
steamer when they put the table-racks on. Seen from 
the pavement, or from the top of another omnibus, 
it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the single ex- 
ample, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses 
coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in 
the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tre- 
mendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole 
populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and 
lurching with the elephantine gait of things which can 
no more capsize than they can keep an even pace. Of 
all the sights of London streets, this procession of the 
omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common 
herd of Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft 
seems to suffer a change into something almost as 
rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary or less 
than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby 
businesses that preoccupy the most of us; they are 
conquering princes, making a progress in a long triumph, 
and looking down upon a lower order of human beings 
from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent 
dignity that they whom they look down upon are not 
merely the drivers of trucks and wagons of low degree, 
but often ladies of title in their family carriages, under 
the care of the august family coachman and footman, 
or gentlemen driving in their own traps or carts, or fares 
in the hansoms that steal their swift course through 
and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always the most 
monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in 
bulk and height; they form the chief impulse of the 
tremendous movement, and it is they that choke from 
time to time the channel of the mighty torrent, and 
helplessly hold it in the arrest of a block. 

48 




A BLOCK IN THE STRAND 



THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS 

No one can forecast the moment when, or the place 
where, a block may happen ; but mostly it occurs in mid- 
afternoon, at the intersection of some street where a 
line of vehicles is crossing the channel of the torrent. 
Suddenly all is at a stand-still, and one of those wonder- 
ful English policemen, who look so slight and young 
after the vast blue bulks of our Irish force, shows himself 
in the middle of the channel, and holds back its rapids 
with the quiet gesture of extended hands. The currents 
and counter-currents gather and press from the rear 
and solidify, but in the narrow fissure the policeman 
stands motionless, with only some such slight stir of his 
extended hands as a cat imparts to her "conscious tail" 
when she waits to spring upon her prey. 

The mute language of his hands, down to the lightest 
accent of the fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of 
those concerned in its interpretation, and is telepathically 
despatched from the nearest to the farthest driver in 
the block. While the policeman stands there in the 
open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not seem 
as if the particles of the mass could detach themselves 
for such separate movement as they have at the best. 
Softly, almost imperceptibly, he drops his arms, and lets 
fall the viewless barrier which he had raised with them; 
he remains where he was, but the immense bodies he 
had stayed liquefy and move in their opposite courses, 
and for that time the block is over. 

If ever London has her epic poet, I think he will sing 
the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must 
be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too 
lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on 
wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play 
of fancy in that impetuous form. We have the hansom 
with us, but it does not perform the essential part in 

49 



LONDON FILMS 

New York life that it does in London life. In New 
York you may take a hansom; in London you must. 
You serve yourself of it as at home you serve yourself 
of the electric car; but not by any means at the same 
rate. Nothing is more deceitful than the cheapness of 
the hansom, for it is of such an immediate and constant 
convenience that the unwary stranger's shilling has 
shpped from him in a sovereign before he knows, with 
the swift succession of occasions when the hansom seems 
imperative. A 'bus is inexpensive, but it is stolid and 
bewildering; a hansom is always cheerfully intelligent. 
It will set you down at the very place you seek ; you need 
walk neither to it nor from it; a nod, a glance, summons 
it or dismisses. The 'bus may be kind, but it is not 
flattering, and the hansom is flattering as well as kind; 
flattering to one's pride, one's doubt, one's timid hope. 
It takes all the responsibility for your prompt and un- 
erring arrival; and you may trust it almost implicitly. 
At any point in London you can bid it go to any other 
with a confidence that I rarely found abused. Once, in- 
deed, my cabman carried me a long way about at mid- 
night, and when he finally left me at my door, he was 
disposed to be critical of its remoteness, while he apolo- 
gized for the delay. I suggested that in a difficulty 
like his a map of London would be a good thing; but 
though he was so far in drink as to be able to take the 
joke in good part, he denied that a map would be of 
the least use to a cabman. Probably he was right; my 
map was not of the least use to me; and his craft seemed 
to feel their way about through the maze of streets 
and squares and circles by the same instinct that serves 
a pilot on a river in the dark. Their knowledge is a 
thing of the nerves, not of the brains, if there is a 
difference; or if there is none, then it is an affair of the 

50 



THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS 

subliminal consciousness, it is inspiration, it is genius. 
It could not well be overpaid, and the cabmen are care- 
ful that it is not underpaid. I heard, indeed, of two 
American ladies who succeeded in underpaying their 
cabman; this was their belief resting upon his solemn 
declaration; but I myself failed in every attempt of the 
kind. My cabman always said that it was not enough; 
and then I compromised by giving him too much. 
Many stories are told of the abusiveness of the class, 
but a simple and effective rule is to overpay them at 
once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one 
cast a sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his 
down-stretched palm, and drive off in thankless silence; 
but any excess of payment was met with eager gratitude. 
I preferred to buy the cabman's good-will, because I 
find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the 
good-will of people whom I do not care the least for, 
and I did not see why I should make an exception of 
cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an extor- 
tionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who 
drove me to the station, and said: "I'll have to get 
another sixpence for this, sir." "Well," I returned, 
with a hardihood which astonished me, "you won't 
get it of me." But I was then leaving London, and 
was no longer afraid. Now, such is the perversity of 
the human spirit, I am sorry he did not get the other 
sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of jus- 
tice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose 
habits of prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even 
in your own interest to suffer yourself to be plundered a 
little; it stimulates the imagination of the plunderer to 
high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which eventu- 
ate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the 
party left a shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I 

51 



LONDON FILMS 

had, after my custom and principle, overpaid, and who 
had left us at a restaurant upon our second thought 
against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put 
down. We duly despaired, but we went and saw the 
pictures, and when we came out of the gallery there was 
our good cabman lying in wait to identify us as the 
losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is 
it credible that if he had been paid only his legal fare 
he would have been at such virtuous pains? It may, 
indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not worth more 
than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was 
actuated by self-interest, but this is a view of our com- 
mon nature which I w^ill not take. 

One hears a good deal of the greater quiet of London 
after New York. I think that what you notice is a 
difference in the quality of the noise in London. What 
is with us mainly a harsh, metallic shriek, a grind of 
trolley wheels upon trolley tracks, and a wild battering 
of their polygonized circles upon the rails, is in London 
the dull, tormented roar of the omnibuses and the in- 
cessant cloop-cloop of the cab-horses' hoofs. Between 
the two sorts of noise there is little choice for one who 
abhors both. The real difference is that in many 
neighborhoods you can more or less get away from the 
specialized noises in London, but you never can do this 
in New York. You hear people saying that in these 
refuges the London noise is mellowed to a soft pour of 
sound, like the steady fall of a cataract, which effectively 
is silence; but that is not accurate. The noise is broken 
and crushed in a huge rumble without a specialized 
sourtd, except when, after midnight, the headlong 
clatter of a cab-horse distinguishes itself from the pre- 
vailing bulk. But the New York noise is never broken 
and crushed into a rumble; it bristles with specific 

52 



THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS 

accents, night and day, which agonizingly assort them- 
selves one from another, and there is no nook or corner 
where you can be safe from them, as you can measurably 
be in London. 

London is, if anything, rather more infested than 
New York with motors, as the English more simply and 
briefly call automobiles. The perspective is seldom 
free of them, and from time to time the air is tainted 
with their breath, which is now one of the most char- 
acteristic stenches of civilization. They share equally 
with other vehicles the drives in the parks, though their 
speed is tempered there to the prevalent pace. They 
add to the general noise the shuddering bursts of their 
swift percussions, and make the soul shrink from a fore- 
cast of what the aeroplane may be when it shall come 
hurtling overhead with some peculiar screech as yet 
unimagined. The motor plays an even more promi- 
nent part in the country than in London, especially in 
those remnants of time which the English call week- 
ends, and which stretch from Friday afternoon to the 
next Monday morning. It is within these limits that 
people are ordinarily "asked down," and as the host 
usually lives from five to ten miles from the nearest 
station, the guest is met there by a motor which hurls 
him over the intervening ground at the speed of the train 
he has just left. The motor is still the rich man's pleas- 
ure, as the week-end is his holiday; and it will be long 
before the one will be the poor man's use, or the other 
his leisure. For the present he must content himself, 
in England, at least, with his own legs, and with the 
bank-holiday which now comes so often as to be dreaded 
by his betters when it lets him loose upon their travel 
and sojourn in excursional multitude. This is not 
Ukely ever to come under question of affecting the Lon- 

53 



LONDON FILxMS 

don season, as one heard the week-end accused of doing. 
It was theorized that people went out of town so much, 
in order to be at home in the country for their friends, 
that with two afternoons and three nights lost to the 
festivities of London, the season was sensibly if not 
vitally affected. But that was in the early weeks of it. 
As it grew and prospered through the latter half of 
June and the whole of July, the week-end, as an inimical 
factor, was no longer mentioned. It even began to be 
recognized as an essential element of the season. Like 
the king's visits to Denmark, to Ireland, to Germany, it 
really served to intensify the season. 

At this point, I find it no longer possible to continue 
celebrating that great moment in the social life of a vast 
empire without accusing myself of triviality and hypoc- 
risy. I have become aware that I really care nothing 
about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with 
most English people who have passed the heyday of 
their youth, perhaps without having drunk deeply, or at 
all, of the dehrious fountain of fashion, it is much the 
same. The purpose that the season clearly serves is 
annually gathering into the capital great numbers 
of the people best worth meeting from all parts of the 
world-wide English dominion, with many aliens of 
distinction, not counting Americans, who are held a 
kind of middle species by the natives. It is a time 
of perpetual breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners, 
receptions, concerts, and for those who can bear it, 
balls till the day of twenty-four hours' pleasure begins 
again, with the early rites of Rotten Row. Those who 
have a superfluity of invitations go on at night from 
one house to another till they fall lifeless into bed at 
their own. One may fancy, if one likes, that they show 
the effects of their pleasure the next day, that many a 

54 



THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS 

soft cheek pales its English rose under the flapping 
panama hats among the riders in the Park, and that, 
lively as they still are, they tend rather to be phantoms 
of delight. But perhaps this is not so. What is cer- 
tain is that for those who do not abuse the season it is a 
time of fine as well as high enjoyment, when the alien, 
or the middle species, if he is known, or even tolerably 
imagined, may taste a cup of social kindness, of hos- 
pitality, deeper if not richer than any in the world. I 
do not say that one of the middle species will find in it the 
delicate, the wild, the piquant flavors of certain remem- 
bered cups of kindness at home; and I should not say 
this even if it were true; but he will be an ungrateful 
and ungracious guest if he criticises. He will more 
wisely and justly accuse himself of having lost his 
earlier zest, if he does not come away always thinking, 
*'What interesting people I have met!" 



VI 

SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION 

IT is perhaps more than possible that among the 
interesting people one meets at luncheons and teas 
and dinners, there will be, or have been, other Americans; 
and this suggests the perilous question whether the 
English like the Americans better than formerly. An 
Englishman might counter by asking whether the 
Americans like the English better than formerly; but 
that would not be answering the question, which I 
hope to leave very much where I found it. Yet Amer- 
icans have heard and read so much of their increasing 
national favor with their contemporary ancestors that 
they may be excused if not satisfied in a curiosity as 
to the fact. Is the universal favor which an emotional 
and imaginative press like ours has portrayed them as 
presently enjoying in England a reality, or is it one of 
the dreams which our press now and then indulges, 
and of which the best that can be said is that they do 
no harm? 

One not only hears of this favor at home, but when 
one goes to England one still hears of it. To be sure 
one hears of it mainly from Americans, but they have 
the best means of knowing the fact; they are chiefly 
concerned, and they are supported in their belief by the 
almost unvaried amenity of the English journals, which 

56 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

now very rarely take the tone towards Americans 
formerly habitual with them. Their change of tone 
is the most obvious change which I think Americans 
can count upon noting when they come to England, and 
I am far from reckoning it insignificant. It did not 
happen of the newspapers themselves; it must be the 
expression of a prevalent mood, if not a very deeply 
rooted feeling in their readers. One hears of their in- 
terest, their kindness, not from the Americans alone; 
the English themselves sometimes profess it, and if 
they overestimate us, the generous error is in the right 
direction. At the end it must cease to be an error, for, 
as we Americans all know, we need only to be better 
understood in order to be more highly prized. Be- 
sides, liking is much oftener the effect of willing than 
has been supposed. 

But if the case were quite the contrary, if it were 
obvious to the casual experience of the American trav- 
eller or sojourner in England, that his nationality was 
now liked less rather than more there, I should still be 
sorry to disturb what is at the worst no worse than 
a fond illusion. The case is by no means the con- 
trary, and yet in consenting to some reason in the 
iridescence which the situation wears in the American 
fancy I should wish to distinguish. For a beginning I 
should not wish to go farther than to say that the sort 
of Englishmen who have always liked Americans, 
because they have liked the American ideal and the kind 
of character realized from it, now probably like them 
better than ever. They are indeed less critical of our 
departure from our old ideal than some Americans, 
perhaps because they have not foreseen, as such Amer- 
icans have foreseen, the necessary effect in American 
character. They can still allow themselves the pleasure 

57 



LONDON FILMS 

which comes from being confirmed in an impression by 
events, and in that pleasure they may somewhat 
romance us; but even such EngUshmen are not bhndly 
fond of us. The other sort of Enghshmen, the sort 
that never hked our ideal or our character, probably now 
Uke us as little as ever, except as they have noted our 
change of ideal, and expect a change of character. To 
them we may very well have seemed a sort of civic 
dissenters, with the implication of some such quality of 
offence as the notion of dissent suggests to minds like 
theirs. We had a political religion like their own, 
with a hierarchy, a ritual, an establishment all complete, 
and we violently broke with it. But it is safe to con- 
jecture that this sort of Englishman is too old or too 
old-fashioned to live much longer; he suffers with the 
decay of certain English interests which the American 
prosperity imperilled before it began to imperil English 
ideals, if it has indeed done so. His dying out counts 
for an increase of favor for us; we enjoy through it a 
sort of promotion by seniority. 

But a new kind of Englishman has come up of late 
years, and so far as he is friendly to us his friendliness 
should be more gratifying than that even of our older 
friends. He has been in America, either much or little, 
and has come to like us because he has seen us at home. 
If such an Englishman is rich and noble, he has seen 
our plutocracy, and has liked it because it is lively and 
inventive in its amusements and profusely original in 
its splendors; but he need not be poor and plebeian to 
have seen something of our better life, and divined 
something of our real meaning from it. He will not 
be to blame if he has not divined our whole meaning; 
for we are at present rather in the dark as to that our- 
selves, and certainly no American who met him in 

58 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

EnMand could wish to blame him, for his cordiality 
forms the warmest welcome that the American can 
have there. If he has been in America and not liked 
us or our order or ideal, he has still the English good- 
nature and if you do not insist upon bemg taken na- 
tionally, there are many chances that he will take you 
personally, and if he finds you not at all hke an Ainer- 
fcan, he will like you, as he liked others in America whom 
he found not at all like Americans. 

It is the foible, however, of many Americans, both 
at home and abroad, that they want to be taken na- 
tionally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyonu 
any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples 
even by others whom we do not love, and ^^^ wish to 
be loved in the lump. We would like to believe tha 
somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and 
evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long 
had a grudge against the English, we would be par- 
ticularly glad to forget it in a sense of En^'^h re 
spect a^rd affection. We would fain believe that the 
English have essentially changed towards us but 
we might easily deceive ourselves, as we could re- 
alize if we asked ourselves the reasons for such a 

""'Thf English are very polite, far politer than they 
have been represented, and they will not wittingly 
wound the American visitor, unless for just cause hke 
business, or the truth. Still, I should say that the Amer- 
ican will fare best with them if he allows himself to be 
taken individually, rather than typically. One s na- 
tionality is to others, after a first moment of surprise a 
bore and a nuisance, which cannot be got out of the 
way too soon. I cannot keep my interest m a German 
or an Italian because he is such; and why should not 

59 



LONDON FILMS 

it be the same with an EngUshman in regard to Ameri- 
cans? If he thinks about our nationahty at all, in 
its historical character, it is rather a pill, which he 
may be supposed to take unwillingly, whether he be- 
lieves we were historically right or not. He may say 
just things about it, but he will say them more for the 
profit of Englishmen than for the pleasure of Amer- 
icans. With our pleasure nationally an Englishman is 
very little concerned, and either he thinks it out of 
taste to show any curiosity concerning us, in the bulk, 
or else he feels none. He has lately read and heard a 
good deal of talk about us ; but I doubt if it has indeUbly 
impressed him. If we have lately done things which 
in their way could not be ignored, they could certainly 
be forgotten, and many Englishmen, in spite of them, 
still remain immensely incurious about us. The Amer- 
ican who wishes to be taken nationally by them must 
often inspire them with a curiosity about us, before he 
can gratify it, and that is a species of self-indulgence 
which leaves a pang. 

The English have, or they often express, an amiable 
notion of us as enormously rich, and perhaps they think 
we are vain of our millionaires, and would be flattered 
by an implication of wealth as common to us all as our 
varying accent. But it is as hard for some of us to 
jive up to a full pocket as for others to live up to a full 
brain. It is hard even to meet the expectation that you 
will know, or know about, our tremendously moneyed 
people; but here is a curiosity which you do not have 
to inspire before you gratify it, for it exists already, 
while as to our political affairs, or even our military 
or naval affairs, not to speak of our scientific or literary 
affairs, the curiosity that you gratify you must first 
have inspired. 

60 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

Their curiosity as to our riches does not judge the 
EngUsh, as might be supposed. They are very romantic, 
with a young, lusty appetite for the bizarre and the 
marvellous, as their taste in fiction evinces; and they 
need not be contemned as sordid admirers of money 
because they wish to know the lengths it can go to with 
the people who seem to be just now making the most 
money. Their interest in a phenomenon which we our- 
selves have not every reason to be proud of, is not 
without justification, as we must allow if we consider 
a little, for if we consider, we must own that our greatest 
achievement in the last twenty or thirty years has been 
in the heaping up of riches. Our magnificent success 
in that sort really eclipses our successes in every other, 
and the average American who comes abroad must be 
content to shine in the reflected glory of those Americans 
who have recently, more than any others, rendered 
our name illustrious. If we do not like the fact all 
that we have to do is to set about doing commen- 
surate things in art, in science, in letters, or even in 
arms. 

It will not quite do to say that the non-millionaire 
American enjoys in England the interest mixed with 
commiseration which is the lot of a poor relation of the 
great among kindly people. That would not be true, 
and possibly the fact is merely that the name American 
first awakens in the English some such associations 
with riches as the name South African awakened before 
it awakened others more poignant and more personal. 
Already the South African had begun to rival the Amer- 
ican in the popular imagination; as the Boer war fades 
more and more into the past, the time may come when 
we shall be confusedly welcomed as Africanders or 
South Americans. 

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LONDON FILMS 

If I were to offer what I have been saying as my opin- 
ions, or my conclusions from sufficient observations I 
should be unfair, if not uncandid. The sum of what 
one sees and hears in a foreign country is as nothing 
to the sum of what one does not see and hear; and the 
immense balance may be so far against the foregoing 
inferences that it is the part of mere prudence to declare 
that they are not my opinions or conclusions, but are 
only impressions, vague and hurried, guesses from 
cursory observations, deductions from slight casual 
incidents. They are mere gleams from social facets, 
sparks struck out by chance encounter, and never 
glancing lights from the rarefied atmosphere in which 
the two nations have their formal reciprocities. For 
all that I have really the right to say from substantial 
evidence to the contrary, I might very well say that 
the English value us for those things of the mind and 
soul which we are somewhat neglectful of ourselves, 
and I insist the more, therefore, that it is only their 
love of fairy-tales which is taken with the notion of an 
opulence so widespread among us as to constitute us a 
nation of potential, if not actual, millionaires. 

They would hasten to reproach me, I am afraid, for 
speaking of England, though merely for purposes of 
illustration, as a foreign country. One is promptly told 
that Americans are not regarded as foreigners in Eng- 
land, and is left to conjecture one's self a sort of com- 
promise between English and alien, a little less kin than 
Canadian and more kind than Australian. The idea 
has its quaintness; but the American in England has 
been singularly unfortunate if he has had reason to be- 
lieve that the kindness done him is not felt. What has 
always been true of the English is true now. They 
do not say or do the thing which is not, out of polite- 

62 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

ness; their hypocrisies, if they have any, are for their 
God, and not for their fellow-man. When they talk of 
their American brethren, they mean it; just as when 
they do not talk of them so they mean something less, 
or nothing at all. The American who wishes to be 
taken nationally, may trust any expression friendly to 
our nation that he hears ; but still I think he will have a 
better time if he prefers being taken personally. That 
is really making one's self at home in a different, I will 
no longer say a foreign, country; the English are eager 
hosts, and wish you to make yourself at home — if they 
like you. Nationally we cannot make ourselves, or 
be made at home, except in the United States. To any 
other people, to people sometimes claiming to be nearer 
than the first degree of cousinship, our nationality, 
taking it in bulk, is necessarily a mystery. We are so 
very like them; why should we be so very unlike them? 
The difference puzzles them, annoys them; why seek 
points of it, and turn them to the light? The same 
mystery distresses the American when the points of 
their difference are turned to the light. A man's na- 
tionality is something he is justly proud of, but not till 
it is put aside can the man of another nation have any 
joy of him humanly, spiritually. If you insist upon 
talking to the English about American things, you 
have them in an unknown world, a really unknowable 
world, as you yourself know it; and you bewilder and 
weary them, unless they are studying Americanism, 
and then they still do not understand you. You are 
speaking English, but the meaning is a strange tongue. 
I say again that I do not know why any one should 
wish to be caressed for his nationality. I think one 
might more self-respectfully wish to be liked for one's 
self than joined with a hundred million compatriots, 

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LONDON FILMS 

and loved in the lump. If the English, however, are 
now trying to love us nationally we should be careful 
not to tax their affections too heavily, or demand too 
much of them. We must remember that they are more 
apt to be deceived by our likeness to themselves than 
by our unlikeness. AVhen an Englishman and an Amer- 
ican meet on common ground they have arrived from 
opposite poles. The Englishman, though he knows the 
road the American has come, cannot really imagine 
it. His whole experience of life has taught him that 
if you have come that road, you are not the kind of 
man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road, 
or else you are another kind of man. He revolves in a 
maze of hopeless conjecture; he gives up trying to guess 
your conundrum, and reads into you the character of 
some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes you 
after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not 
for your nation. All the same he may not know it, 
and may think he likes you because you are an agreeable 
American. 

My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying 
(that, on such dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an 
inference from which I shrink a little ; it seems so very 
bold, so very contrary to recent prepossessions. But the 
candor which I would be so glad not to practise, obliges 
me to say that I think the American who is himself 
interesting, would have been as welcome in England 
twenty-five years ago as at this day, and he would not 
have been expected to be rich, or to have the acquaint- 
ance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote pe- 
riod, certain fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied 
the English taste for wildness in us. There had been 
Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been other 
Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. 

64 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

There had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, 
of an American fineness, which might be as well in its 
way as the American wildness, and the American who 
had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a 
liking ready for him then as the wild American found 
earlier, or the rich American finds later. 

In fact, interesting Americans have always been per- 
sonally liked in England, if I must really go to the 
extreme of saying it. AVhat the English now join in 
owning, if the question of greater kindness between the 
two countries comes up, is that their ruling class made 
a vast mistake in choosing, officiously though not offi- 
cially, the side of the South in our Civil War. They 
own it frankly, eagerly. But they owned the same 
thing frankly, if not so eagerly, twenty-five years ago. 
Even during the Civil War, I doubt if an acceptable 
American would have suffered personally among them. 
He would have suffered nationally, but he has now and 
then to suffer so still, for they cannot have the same 
measure of his nationality as he, and they necessarily 
tread upon its subtile circumferences here and there. 

From the very beginning of Americanism the case 
has been the same. The American in England during 
the Civil War was strangely unfortunate if he did not 
meet many and great Englishmen who thought and 
felt with him; and if there were now any American so 
stricken in years as to be able to testify from his own 
experience of the English attitude towards us in the 
War of Independence, he could tell us of the outspoken 
and constant sympathy of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Wal- 
pole, and their like, with the American cause — which 
they counted the English cause. He could tell of the 
deep undercurrent of favor among the English people, 
which the superficial course of power belied and at last 

65 



LONDON FILMS 

ceased to control, in our earlier vital war as well as in 
our later. 

So much for that consideration of us nationally, which 
I do not think England, in her quality of hostess, is 
bound to show her several American guests. I do not 
blame her that the sympathy of her greatest sons, so 
far as it has been shown us nationally, has been shown 
in her interest, which they believed the supreme in- 
terest of mankind, rather than in our interest, which it 
is for us to believe the supreme interest of mankind. 
Even when they are talking America they are thinking 
England; they cannot otherwise; they must; it is im- 
perative; it is essential that they should. We talk of 
England on the same terms, with our own inner version. 

There is another point in this inquiry which I hesitate 
to touch, and which if I were better advised I should 
not touch — that is, the English interest in the beauty 
and brilliancy of our women. Their charm is now 
magnanimously conceded and now violently confuted 
in their public prints; now and then an Englishman 
lets himself go — over his own signature even, at times — 
and denounces our women, their loveliness, their liveli- 
ness, their goodness, in terms which if I repeated them 
would make some timider spirits pause in their resolu- 
tion to marry English dukes and run English society. 
But his hot words are hardly cold before another Eng- 
lishman comes to the rescue of our countrywomen, and 
lifts them again to that pinnacle w4iere their merits 
quite as much as the imagination of their novelists have 
placed them. Almost as much as our millionaires 
they are the object of a curiosity which one has not 
had to inspire. Where, in what part, in which favored 
city, do they most abound ? What is the secret of their 
dazzling wit and beauty, the heart of their mystery? 

66 



THE AMERICAN INVASION 

The most ardent of their votaries must flush in generous 
deprecation when those orphic inquiries flow from hps 
quite as divine as their own. 

For the rest, if there is really that present liking for 
Americans in England, which we must wish to touch 
with all delicacy as the precious bloom of a century- 
plant at last coming to flower, the explanation may be 
sought perhaps in an effect of the English nature to 
which I shall not be the one to limit it. They have 
not substantially so much as phenomenally changed 
towards us. They are, like ourselves, always taking 
stock, examining themselves to see what they have on 
hand. From time to time they will, say, accuse them- 
selves of being insular, and then, suddenly, they invite 
themselves to be continental, to be French, to be Ger- 
man, to be Italian, to be Bulgarian, or whatever; and 
for a while they believe that they have become so. All 
this time they remain immutably English. It is not that 
they are insensible of their defects; they tell themselves 
of them in clamorous tones; and of late, possibly, they 
have asked themselves why they are not what they 
think the Americans are in certain things. If the logic 
of their emotions in this direction were a resolution to 
like all the Americans with a universal affection, I should 
admire their spirit, but I should feel a difficulty in its op- 
eration for a reason which I hesitate to confess; I do not 
like all the Americans myself. 



VII 
IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS 

IN speaking of any specific social experience it is al- 
ways a question of how far one may pardonably 
err on the side of indiscretion; and if I remember here 
a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons — in 
a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a 
cathedral crypt — it is with the sufficiently meek hope of 
keeping well within bounds which only the nerves can 
ascertain. 

The quaintness of the place may have contributed 
to an uncommon charm in the occasion; but its charm 
was perhaps a happy accident which would have tried 
in vain to repeat itself even there. It ended in a visit 
to the House, where the strangers were admitted on 
the rigid terms and in the strict limits to which non- 
members must submit themselves. But one might 
well undergo much more in order to hear John Burns 
speak in the place to which he has fought his right under 
a system of things as averse as can be imagined to a 
working-man's sharing in the legislation for working- 
men. The matter in hand that night chanced to be one 
peculiarly interesting to a believer in the people's doing 
as many things as possible for themselves, as the body 
politic, instead of leaving them to a variety of bodies 
corporate. The steamboat service on the Thames had 
grown so insufficient and so inconvenient that it was 

68 



IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS 

now a question of having it performed by the London 
County Council, which should be authorized to run lines 
of boats solely in the pubhc interest, and not merely 
for the pleasure and profit of directors and stockholders. 
The monstrous proposition did not alarm those fears of 
socialism which anything of the kind would have roused 
with us; nobody seemed to expect that blowing up the 
Parliament buildings with dynamite would be the next 
step towards anarchy. There was a good deal of hear- 
hearing from Mr. Burns's friends, with some friendly 
chaffing from his enemies as he went on, steadily and 
quietly, with his statement of the case; but there was 
no serious opposition to the measure which was after- 
wards carried in due course of legislation. 

I was left to think two or three things about the 
matter which, though not strictly photographic, are 
yet so superficial that they will not be out of place here. 
Several members spoke besides Mr. Burns, but the labor 
leader was easily first, not only in the business quality 
of what he said, but in his business fashion of saying it. 
As much as any of them, as the oldest-familied and 
longest-leisured of them, his manners had 

"that repose 
Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere,'^ 

and is supposed to distinguish them from those of the 
castes of Smith and Brown. But I quickly forgot this 
in considering how far socialism had got itself realized 
in London through the activities of the County Council, 
which are so largely in the direction of municipal control. 
One hears and reads as little of socialism now in London 
as in New York, but that is because it has so effectually 
passed from the debated principle to the accomplished 
fact. It has been embodied in so many admirable 



LONDON FILMS 

works that the presumption is rather in favor of it as 
something truly conservative. It is not, as with us, 
still under the ban of a prejudice too ignorant to know 
in how many things it is already effective; but this is, 
of course, mainly because English administration is so 
nmch honester than ours. It can be safely taken for 
granted that a thing ostensibly done for the greatest 
good of the greatest number is not really done for the 
profit of a few on the inside. The English can let the 
County Council put mmiicipal boats on the Thames 
with the full assurance that the County Council will 
never be in case to retire on a cumulative income from 
them. 

But apparently the English can do this only by laying 
the duty and responsibility upon the imperial legislat- 
ure. It was droll to sit there and hear a body, ulti- 
mately if not immediately charged with the welfare of 
a state conscious in every continent and the islands of 
every sea, debating whether the municipal steamboats 
would not be too solely for the behoof of the London 
suburb of West Ham. England, Scotland, Ireland, 
Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, 
with any of their tremendous interests, must rest in 
abeyance while that question concerning West Ham 
was pending. We, in our way, would have settled it 
by the vote of a Board of Aldermen, subject to the veto 
of a mayor; but we might not have settled it so justly 
as the British Parliament did in concentrating the collec- 
tive wisdom of a world-empire upon it. 

The House of Commons took its tremendous respon- 
sibility lightly, even gayly. Except for the dramatic 
division into government and opposition benches, the 
spectacle was in no wise impressive. There was a 
restless going and coming of members, as if they could 

70 



IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMIMONS 

not stand being bored by their duties any longer, and 
then, after a brief absence, found strength for them. 
Some sat with their hats on, some with their hats off; 
some with their legs stretched out, some with their legs 
pulled in. One could easily distinguish the well-known 
faces of ministers, who paid no more heed, apparently, 
to what was going on than the least recognizable mem- 
bers unknown to caricature. The reporters, in their 
gallery, alone seemed to give any attention to the pro- 
ceedings, but doubtless the speaker, under his official 
wig, concerned himself with them. The people ap- 
parently most interested were, like myself, in the vis- 
itors' gallery. From time to time one of them asked 
the nearest usher who it was that was speaking; in his 
eagerness to see and hear, one of them would rise up 
and crane forward, and then the nearest usher would 
make him sit down; but the ushers were generally very 
lenient, and upon the w^hole looked quite up to the level 
of the average visitor in intelligence. 

I am speaking of the men visitors; the intellectual 
light of the women visitors, whatever it was, was much 
dispersed and intercepted by the screen behind which 
they were placed. I do not know why the women should 
be thus obscured, for, if the minds of members were in 
danger of being distracted by their presence, I should 
think they would be still more distracted when the ele- 
ment of mystery was added to it by the grille. Seen 
across the whole length of the House from the men's 
gallery the women looked as if tightly pressed against 
the grille, and had a curiously thin, phantasmal ef- 
fect, or the effect of frescoed figures done very flat. 
To the imaginative spectator their state might have 
symbolized the relation of women to Parliamentary 
politics, of which we read much in English novels, and 
6 71 



LONDON FILMS 

even English newspapers. Women take much more 
interest in poUtical affairs in England than with us; 
that is well known; but it may not be so well known 
that they are in much greater enjoyment of the fran- 
chise, if the franchise is indeed a pleasure. I do not 
know whether they vote for school-committeemen, or 
whether there are school-committeemen for them to vote 
for; but they may vote for guardians of the poor, and 
may themselves be voted for to that office; and they 
may vote for members of the Urban Councils and the 
County Councils if they have property to be taxed by 
those bodies. This is the right for which our Revolu- 
tion was made, though we continue, with regard to 
women, the Georgian heresy of taxation without repre- 
sentation; but it is doubtful to the barbarian whether 
good can come of women's mixing in parliamentary 
elections at which they have no vote. Of course, with 
us a like interference would be taken jocosely, ironically; 
it would, at the bottom, be a good joke, amusing from 
the tendency of the feminine temperament to acts of 
circus in moments of high excitement; but whether the 
Englislmien regard it so, the English alone know. 
They are much more serious than w^e, and perhaps they 
take it as a fit manifestation of the family principle 
which is the underlying force of the British Constitution. 
One heard of ladies who were stumping (or whatever 
is the English equivalent of stumping) the country on 
the preferential tariff question and the other questions 
which divide Conservatives and Liberals; but in spite 
of these examples of their proficiency the doubt re- 
mained whether those who have not the suffrage can 
profitably attempt to influence it. Till women can 
make up their minds to demand and accept its respon- 
sibilities, possibly they will do best to let it alone. 

72 



IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS 

When they want it they will have it; but until they do, 
it may not be for nothing, or even for the control of the 
members' wandering fancies, that the House of Com- 
mons interposes between them and itself the grille 
through which they show like beauteous wraiths or 
frescoes in the flat. That screen is emblematic of 
their real exclusion from the higher government which 
their social participation in parhamentary elections, 
and the men's habit of talking politics with them, 
flatter them into a delusive sense of sharing. A woman 
may be the queen of England, but she may not be 
one of its legislators. That must be because women 
like being queens and do not really care for being 
legislators. 



VIII 
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 

THE secular intensification of the family life makcb 
it possible for the English to abandon their secular 
domesticity, when they will, without apparent detri- 
ment to the family life. Formerly the English family 
which came up to London for the season or a part of it 
went into a house of its own, or, in default of that, went 
into lodgings, or into a hotel of a kind happily obso- 
lescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the 
hotels which abound in London, of a type combining 
more of the Continental and American features than 
the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold, 
grim, and silently rapacious, heavy in appointments 
and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel 
is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a 
home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all 
ruinous. It has a table-d'hote dinner at separate tables 
and a fair version of the French cuisine. If it is one of 
the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dear- 
est, and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every 
way than our cheaper. The supply has created a de- 
mand which apparently did not exist before, and the 
Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a 
hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the 
American with being. 

In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants 

74 



THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 

in great number and variety, he has become a diner and 
luncher at restaurants. Whether he has been able to 
exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once 
supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle 
species, cannot say, but it is evident that at his hotel 
or his restaurant he dines or lunches as publicly as ever 
the American did or does; and he has his friends to din- 
ner or lunch without pretence of a private dining-room. 
One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by 
its facility to those excesses of hospitality which are such 
a drain on English incomes; but again that is something 
of which an outsider can hardly venture to have an 
opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern 
hotel and restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are push- 
ing the old-fashioned lodging as well as the old-fashioned 
hotel out of the general favor, and have already driven 
them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a level 
where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species. 
In the streets neighboring on Piccadilly there are 
many apartments which are effectively small hotels, 
where you pay a certain price for your rooms, and a 
certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave 
this neighborhood if you want the true lodging where 
you pay for your apartment, and order the provisions 
which are cooked for you, and which are apportioned 
to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is not seri- 
ously affected by the reality that your provisions are 
also apportioned to the needs of your landlord's family. 
Even then, the ideal remains beautiful, and you have 
an image, somewhat blurred and battered, of home, 
such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your 
landlord is the butler who has married the cook, your 
valeting and cooking approach as nearly perfection as 

you can hopefully demand. 

75 



LONDON FILMS 

It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities 
of the appointments over which an air of decent reti- 
cence is cast, and it will have been quite useless to try 
guarding all the points at which you might be plundered. 
The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and perhaps 
in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging 
you are promptly and respectfully personalized; your 
tastes are consulted, if not gratified; your minor wants, 
in which your comfort lies, are interpreted, and possibly 
there grows up round you the semblance, which is not 
altogether deceitful, of your o\^m house. 

The theory is admirable, but I think the system is 
in decay, though to say this is something like accusing 
the stability of the Constitution. Very likely if some 
American ghost were to revisit a well-known London 
street a hundred years from now, he would find it still 
with the legend of "Apartments" in every transom; 
and it must not be supposed that lodgings have by any 
means fallen wholly to the middle, much less the lower 
middle, classes. In one place there was a marquis over- 
head; in another there was a lordship of unascertained 
degree, who was heard on a court night being got ready 
by his valet and the landlord's whole force, and then 
marking his descent to his cab by the clanking of his 
sword upon the stairs, after which the joint service 
spent a good part of the night in celebrating the event 
at a banquet in the basement. At two lodgings in a 
most unpretentious street, it was the landlords' boast 
that a royal princess had taken tea with their tenants, 
who were of the quality to be rightfully taken tea with 
by a royal princess; and at certain hours of the after- 
noon during the season it was not uncommon to see 
noble equipages standing at the doors of certain apart- 
ments with a full equipment of coachmen and foot- 

76 



THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 

men, ana ladies of unmistakable fashion ascending and 
descending by the carriage - steps like the angels on 
Jacob's ladder. It could be surmised that they were 
visiting poor relations, or modest merit of some sort, 
but it was not necessary to suppose this, and upon the 
whole I prefer not. 

The search for lodgings, which began before the sea- 
son was conscious of itself, was its own reward in the 
pleasures it yielded to the student of human nature and 
the lover of mild adventure. The belief in lodgings 
was a survival from an age of faith, when in the early 
eighteen-eighties they seemed the most commodious 
and desirable refuge to the outwandering American 
family which then first proved them. The fragmentary 
outwanderers who now visited London, after an absence 
of twenty-two years, did not take into account the fact 
that their apartment of long ago was the fine event of 
the search, prolonged for weeks, of two friends, singu- 
larly intelligent and rarely versed in London; they 
took it as a type, and expected to drive directly to its fel- 
low. They drove indirectly to unnumbered lodgings 
unlike it and unworthy of its memory, and it was not 
until after three days that they were able to fix upon a 
lodging that appeared the least remote from their ideal. 
Then, in a street not too far from Mayfair, and of the 
quality of a self-respectful dependant of Belgravia, they 
set up their breathless Lares and panting Penates, and 
settled down with a sense of comfort that grew upon 
them day by day. The place undeniably had its charm, 
if not its merit. The drawing-room chairs were in a 
proper pattern of brocade, and, though abraded at their 
edges and corners, were of a tasteful frame; the arm- 
chairs, covered like the sofa in a cheerful cretonne, lent 
the parting guest the help of an outward incline; the 

77 



LONDON FILMS 

sofa, heaped with cushions, could not conceal a broken 
spring, though it braved it out with the consciousness 
of having been sat upon by a royal princess who had 
once taken tea in that lodging. But the other appoint- 
ments, including a pretty writing-desk and a multitude 
of china plates almost hiding the wall-paper, were un- 
fractured, and the little dining-room was very cosey. 
After breakfast it had the habit of turning itself into a 
study, where one of the outwanderers used to set himself 
down and ask himself with pen and ink what he honest- 
ly thought and felt about this England which he had 
always been more or less bothering about. The inquiry 
took time which he might better have spent in day- 
dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven, 
with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots 
mezzotinted against it. He might have more profitably 
wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow- 
brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their 
clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle dis- 
tance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered 
outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy back- 
yards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with 
the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green 
points of electric light: the same sort of light that 
showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing 
under them. Inquiries into English civilization can 
always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man, 
and I put them down roughly in behalf of a futile phi- 
losopher who ought to have studied them in their inex- 
haustible detail. 

He could not be reproached with insensibility to his 
domestic circumstance, from the combination of cook 
and butler which took him into its ideal keeping to the 
unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron who 

78 



THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 

had the dining-room floor, and was represented through 
his open door by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly 
valeted clothes. The valeting in that house was unex- 
ceptionable, and the service at table was of a dress- 
coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever 
eaten ^ there. The service throughout was of a gravity 
never relaxed, except in the intimate moments of 
bringing the bath in the morning, when the news of the 
day before and the coming events of the present day 
were suggestively yet respectfully discussed. 

The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of 
their most fortunate inspirations in sight-seeing to the 
suggestions of the landlord, whose apartments I would 
in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There was, 
indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made 
by some envious trunk; but there was nothing of the 
frowziness, the shabbiness of many of those houses in 
the streets neighboring Mayfair where many Americans 
are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house 
on the borders of Belgravia. 

The Americans I am imagining had first carried on 
their search in those genteel regions, which could hardly 
have looked their best in the last moments of prepara- 
tion before the season began. The house-cleaning which 
went on in all of them was no more hurried than the ad- 
vance of the slow English spring outside, where the buds 
appeared after weeks of hesitation, and the leaves un- 
folded themselves at long leisure, and the blossoms de- 
liberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better 
stay in than come out. Day after day found the lodg- 
ing-houses with their carpets up, and their furniture 
inverted, and their hallways and stairways reeking 
from slop-pails or smelling from paint-pots, and with 
no visible promise of readiness for lodgers. They were 

79 



LONDON FILMS 

pretty nearly all of one type. A young German or 
Swiss — there for the language — came to the door in the 
coat he had not always got quite into, and then sum- 
moned from the depths below a landlord or landlady to 
be specific about times and terms, to show the rooms, 
and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest dim 
and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the thresh- 
old and worn to the quick by the cleansing of number- 
less feet; and an indescribable frowziness prevailed which 
imparted itself to the condition of widowhood dug up 
by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes 
there responded to his summons a clerical, an almost 
episcopal presence, which was clearly that of a former 
butler, unctuous in manner and person from long serv- 
ing. Or sometimes there would be something much 
more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth; 
in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond 
the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of 
holding in the background unsurmised charges for 
electric lights, for candles, for washing, for baths, for 
boots, and for what-know-I, after the most explicit 
declaration that the first demand included everything. 
Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that 
when the season began, or after the first of May the rent 
would be doubled. 

The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled 
drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted cham- 
bers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white 
counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier 
mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind 
courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby 
antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall 
showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of 
recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of 

80 




By courtesy of Loiidini Stermscoptc and Photograph Company 

ST. Paul's cathedral 



THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 

pseudo-sesthetic rugs. The drawing-room expected to 
be the dining-room also, and faintly breathed the stale- 
ness of the meals served in it. If the front windows 
often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows 
had no air but that of the sunless spaces which successive 
architectural exigencies had crowded with projecting 
cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement sky- 
lights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages 
and the stairs were never visible except after dark; even 
then the foot rather than the eye found the way. Yet, 
once settled in such a place, it developed possibilities of 
comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest hope- 
fulness could not have forecast. The meals came up 
and could be eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English 
hotels have good and nearly all English lodgings bad, 
could be exchanged for tea; the service was always well- 
intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid 
twice as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so 
ill-used as you might have been. 

It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs, 
is unsteady on its feet from the competition of the great 
numbers of those large, new, reasonably cheap, and 
admirably managed hotels. Yet the lodging-houses 
remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions, 
throughout the land, and if the English are giving them 
up they are renouncing them with national delibera- 
tion. The most mysterious fact concerning them is 
that they are, with all their multitude, so difficult to 
get, and are so very bad when you have got them. 
Having said this, I remember with fond regret particular 
advantages in every lodging of my acquaintance. 



IX 
CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME 

THE painting -up which the apartments, as they 
always call themselves, undergo inside and out, in 
preparation for the season, is a rite to which all London 
bows during April as far as it can afford it. The lodg- 
ing-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh 
green its front door and window - frames, or perhaps 
reddening its area railing; but private houses pretend- 
ing to be smart clothe themselves from eave to base- 
ment in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints sus- 
ceptible of the soonest harm from the natural and 
artificial climates of London. While the paint is fresh, 
or "wet," the word by which you are warned from its 
contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives 
the gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the 
boxes of brilliant flowers at every window-sill, promises 
a gayety which the season realizes in rather unusual 
measure. It is said that the flowers at the windows 
must be renewed every month, against the blight of 
the London smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot 
be renewed so often, it is of perhaps a little more durable 
beauty. For a month of preparation, while the house- 
fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters 
emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful 
trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, 
and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the 

82 



TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME 

grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of 
another London season. 

If the American's business or pleasure takes him out 
of town on the edge of the season and brings him back 
well over its border, he will have an agreeable effect 
from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs 
he left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion 
will have got in its work, and the streets, the pavements, 
the parks will have responded with a splendor, a gayety 
earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more 
those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the 
passing feet will be oftener those going to luncheon and 
afternoon tea, and not so solely those hurrying to or 
lagging from the toils of the day. Even the morning 
trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to 
arrive with multitudes fresher and brighter than those 
which arrived before the season began. I do not know 
whether it was in tribute to the joyful time that a house- 
maid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and 
whitening up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore 
a long, black train and a bolero hat and jacket, and I do 
not say that this is the usual dress of the London house- 
maid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting 
on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all 
the London steps wear in the morning. One might as 
well pretend that the may is consciously white and red 
on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares in honor 
of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so 
with no apparent literary association, but the American 
must always feel as if he were quoting the name from 
an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly 
appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom al- 
most as long as its namesake month endures. But that 
is no great wonder : when a tree has worked as hard as a 

83 



LONDON FILMS 

tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is natu- 
rally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on 
for weeks. 

The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their 
silken fulness; the trees stood densely, softly, darkly 
rounded in the dim air, and they did not begin to shed 
their foliage till almost two months later. But I think 
I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the 
London trees as one evening in the grounds of a country 
club not so far out of London as not to have London 
trees in its grounds. They were mostly oaks, beeches, 
and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide, 
slow water, which could not be called a stream, and they 
hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists. 
The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density 
as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I de- 
clared which the birds were singing their vespers in. 
There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I 
think must have been singing in the heart of the mist, 
and which probably mistook it for a tree of like sub- 
stance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; 
and really the place w^as enchanting, with its close- 
cropped, daisy - starred lawns, and the gay figures of 
polo-players coming home from a distant field in the 
pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June. 

The birds are heard everywhere in London through 
that glowing month, and their singing would drown 
the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab- 
horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens 
of the houses back together and form innumerable 
shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty 
of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the 
American city-dweller, who never sees anything but 
clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but 

84 



TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME 

they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more 
spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses 
throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens. 

The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, 
London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it 
where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in 
the street which was almost Belgravian was not without 
its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really 
warm days came (and they came at the time appointed 
by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a 
coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends 
building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph 
for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be 
making some very gravelly garden-beds along the wall 
when the hen proclaimed her achievement, and he called 
his children and their mother to rejoice with him. His 
oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his 
lodgers came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am 
sure the royal princess would have done if she had been 
taking tea there that afternoon. 

He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, 
and though his aspirates were dislocated, his heart, 
however he miscalled it, was in the right place. We 
had many improving conversations, by which I profited 
more than he ; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of 
every class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively 
upon the rights of his station. In England you feel that 
you cannot trespass upon the social demesne of the 
lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the 
premises. The social inferiors have a convention of 
profound respect for the social superiors, but it some- 
times seemed provisional only, a mask which they ex- 
pected one day to drop ; yet this may have been one of 
those errors which foreigners easily make. What is 

85 



LONDON FILMS 

certain is that the superior had better keep to his place, 
as the inferior keeps to his. Across the barrier the 
classes can and do exchange much more kindness than 
we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this 
is not a good time to say that the English manner to 
dependants is beyond criticism. The consideration for 
them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things if 
they please, and they are invariably and distinctly 
thanked for the smallest service. There are no doubt 
exceptions to the kindness which one sees, but I did not 
see the exceptions. The social machinery has so little 
play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the 
grind of class upon class might be intolerable. With 
us in America there is no love lost between rich and 
poor; unless the poor are directly and obviously depen- 
dent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with 
one another, as they never seem in England. Very 
possibly that perfect English manner from superiors 
is also a convention, like the respect of the inferiors, 
but it is a becoming one. 

This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to 
say my landlord, who told me that when he first took 
that house a flock of starlings used to visit him in the 
spring. He did not tell me that his little house stood 
in the region of Nell Gwynne's mulberry-gardens; his 
knowledge was of observation, not of reading; and he 
was a gossip only about impersonal things. Concerning 
his lodgers he was as a grave for silence, and I fancy 
this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the 
national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak 
once of a young German lodger whom he had kept 
from going to a garden-party in full evening-dress, but 
the incident was of a remoteness which excused its 
mention. What had impressed him in it was the for- 

86 



TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME 

eigner's almost tearful gratitude when he came home 
and acknowledged that he had found everybody in the 
sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him 
to wear. 

While the may was still hesitating on the hawthorns 
whether to come out, there were plum and peach trees 
in the gardens which emulated the earlier daring of the 
almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the 
greengages that come there after they have ceased to 
come from France are as good as our own when the 
curculio does not get them; but the efflorescence of the 
peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they never 
fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally 
sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances 
are against them. Perhaps the fruits of the fields and 
orchards, if not of the streets, would do better in Eng- 
land if the nights were warmer. The days are often 
quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so de- 
cidedly that even in that heated fortnight in July a 
blanket or two were never too much. In the spring a 
day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of 
the afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid. 



SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY 
SIGHT-SEEING 

I HAD a very good will towards all the historic 
temples in London, and I hope that this, with the 
fact that I had seen them before, will pass for my ex- 
cuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed 
had some self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul's, of 
which I said to myself I ought to see it again; there 
might be an emotion in it. I passed and repassed it, 
till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I 
entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of 
other tardy visitors who had come at the closing hour. 
After this unavailing visit, the necessity of going again 
established itself in me, and I went repeatedly, choosing, 
indeed, rainy days when I could not well go elsewhere, 
and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy 
of its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments. 

Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that 
St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted 
St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very 
hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey 
in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey 
are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they 
are in the taste of times far enough back to have become 
rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death 
starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me 

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; 
but I do very much mind the heavy presence of the 
Fames or Britannias of the earUer nineteenth century 
celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement 
in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when 
the national type was least able to inspire grief with 
an artistic expression. The statesmen, the ecclesiastics, 
the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about 
in stone with no more interest for the spectator than 
the Fames or the Britannias. 

The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much 
as at that list of London bishops, which, if you are so 
lucky as to come on it by chance where it is inscribed 
beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense of the 
long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops 
of the Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly 
Latin names; bishops of the Saxon and Danish times 
remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops of 
the Norman time, with appellations that again flow 
upon the tongue; bishops of the English time, with 
designations as familiar as those in the directory: what 
a record! It moves you more than any of those uni- 
formed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, 
and it speaks more eloquently of the infrangible con- 
tinuity, the unbroken greatness of England. 

My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other 
English cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to 
think, that England was overgothicized, and that I 
should be glad, or at least relieved, by something 
classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That 
architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the 
English faith, which continues the ancient tradition in 
terms not ceremonially very distinct from those of 
Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York 

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LONDON FILMS 

to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences 
which' were all in favor of the elder fane. The minster 
now asserted its superior majesty, and its mere magni- 
tude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its 
clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty 
windows, as they held their own in my memory, dwarfed 
St. Paul's as much physically as spiritually. 

A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces 
of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined 
by the electric blaze in the choir ; a monotonous chanting 
filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period 
of the church, and the sense of something pagan that 
had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, 
the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. 
Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man, 
not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. 
Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were 
ordered to be built after the plans of the most skilful 
architects of their time and race, and both are monu- 
ments to civilizations which had outUved mystery. 

I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey 
than to St. Paul's, but I had from the first so profoundly 
and thoroughly naturalized myself to the place that it 
was like going back to a home of my youth. It was, 
indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; 
and if I might advise any reader who still has his first 
visit to Westminster Abbey before him, I would counsel 
him not to go there much past his twenty-fourth year. 
If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the 
year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the Enghsh 
December, so short as to be red all through with a sense 
of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset. 
Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell 
him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and 

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up 
in the Poets' Corner and read the words, " Oh, rare Ben 
Jonson!" The good Ben was never so constantly 
rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well 
enough from having tried to read him in days when I 
was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning 
then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the 
riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a 
wealth of poetry w^iich he had not actually enjoyed; 
and in this generous emotion the tears came. 

I am not sensible of having been grouped with others 
in charge of a verger, but a verger there must have been, 
and at my next visit there must equally have been one; 
he only entered, rigid, authoritative, unsparing, into 
my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely 
separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that 
he was going with a flock of other docile tourists. I 
suppose it would be possible to see Westminster Abbey 
without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be 
safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second 
visits, but that my memory rejected him as unfit for 
association with fames and names made so much of in 
death that it seemed better than life in all dignified 
particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my 
chances of getting along for a few centuries on earth. 

I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for 
he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of 
such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next- 
to-last visit I found him most intelligibly accessible to 
my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty 
which used to be carried in the funeral processions of 
the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till 
he had dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then, 
for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some 

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upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence 
of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they 
had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly life- 
like in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubt- 
less there were others, but those are the ones I recall, 
and with their identity I felt the power that glared 
from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Eliza- 
beth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that 
dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into 
them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish 
that art had so preserved all the great embodiments of 
history. 

I hope it was some better motive than the sight- 
seer's that at least partly caused me to make myself part 
of the congregation listening to a sermon in the Abbey 
on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the 
stir of the place's literary associations began with the 
sight of Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like 
him, in the grand simplicity of his looks, as he was when 
he lived; and then presently the effigies of all the "dear 
sons of memory" began to reveal themselves, medallion 
and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory 
and inscription. We went and sat, for the choral ser- 
vice, under the bust of Macaulay, and, looking down, 
we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his 
grave. It might have been the wounded sense of 
reverence, it might have been the dread of a longer 
sermon than we had time for, but we left before the 
sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt 
little public garden which lies by the Thames in the 
shadow of the Parliament Houses; and who has said 
the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand 
years old, but some day they will be, and then those 
who cavilled at them when they were only fifty will be 

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

sorry. For my part I think them as Gothically noble 
and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic, 
too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew 
from the ground there far into the gray sky to which 
their architecture is native. It was a pale, resigned 
afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted heat 
in it, which a recent rain had sHghtly abated, and we 
were glad of a memoriferous property which it seemed 
to exhale. Suddenly in the midst of that most alien 
environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom 
we had last parted twenty years before in the woods 
beside Lake George, and whose apparition at once 
implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so sensa- 
tional is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if 
it is so, why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and 
we were in the shadow of the Parliament Houses again, 
and no longer in that of the forest which did not know 
it was Gothic. 

We were going to hang upon the parapet of West- 
minster Bridge for the view it offers of the Houses, 
to which the spacious river makes itself a foreground 
such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in 
this cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the 
pleasure of realizing the statue of Cromwell which has 
somehow found place where it belongs in those stately 
precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his 
sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend 
of Parliaments than Charles whom he slew, but he was 
such a massive piece of English history that the void his 
effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons 
must have ached for it before. 

When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of 
the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove 
homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The 

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LONDON FILMS 

roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the 
crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, 
shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant 
than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense 
everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and 
the children strayed along the streets without playing, 
or lagged homeward behind their parents. There were 
no vehicles except those of pleasure or convenience; the 
omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar; our cab- 
horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the 
noisiest thing we heard. The trees in the squares and 
places hung dull and tired in the coolish, dusty atmos- 
phere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon 
passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties 
of experience which, after all, one does not impart. 

Those who like, as I do, the innocence which compan- 
ions the sophistication of London will frequent Kensing- 
ton Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has 
set the seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then 
seems peculiarly the playground of little children in 
the care of their nurses, if they are well-to-do people's 
children, and in one another's care if they are poor 
people's. All over England the tenderness of the little 
children for the less is delightful. I remember to have 
seen scarcely any squabbling, and I saw abundance of 
caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies of 
almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if 
it were a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This 
goes on in spite of a reciprocal untidiness which is in- 
describable; for the English poor children have the 
very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch have 
dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering 
of filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think, 
perhaps, they wash up a little when they come to play 

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

in Kensington Gardens, to sail their ships on its placid 
waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter the 
palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as 
they do in troops, they are commonly in charge of their 
teachers; and their raptures of loyalty in the presence 
of those reminders that queens, too, must have once 
been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are doubtless 
as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and 
political associations. Since William III. built the 
palace and laid out the gardens that he might dwell 
within easy reach of his capital, but out of its smoke 
and din, the place has not lost the character which his 
homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially 
sweet and commendable because of its relation to the 
good Victoria's childhood. One does not forget ^' great 
Anna's " drinking tea there in the Orangery so nobly de- 
signed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is 
dearest because Victoria spent so many of her early 
days in it, and received there the awful summons lit- 
erally to rise from her dreams and come and be queen 
of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke 
of poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet 
provided even for the election of young girls to the 
presidency; and though we may prefer our prosaical 
republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of 
such an incident in the mother monarchy. 

The Temple was another of the places that I did not 
think I should visit again, because I had so pleasant 
and perfect a memory of it, which I feared to impair. 
More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in the 
chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and 
then went out and wandered about in the wet, for it 
was raining very diligently. I cannot say, now, just 
where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was 

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down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a 
way the first images of places always remain, however 
blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a 
dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next 
saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September 
day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in 
which I had left them then, but from the pensive asso- 
ciations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as 
that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my 
wonted gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler 
after our drive from the Thames Embankment and be- 
gan to walk up towards the Temple Church. I will not 
ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will mere- 
ly have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies 
of the crusaders lying cross-legged in the pavement 
of the circle to which one enters. According to the 
strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our party, 
these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture 
since she saw them first. It was not merely that they 
had uncrossed their legs and crossed them another way, 
or some such small matter; but that now they lay side 
by side, whereas formerly they had better accommo- 
dated themselves to the architectural design, and lain 
in a ring with their long-pointed toes pointing inward 
to the centre. AVhy they should have changed, we 
could not understand; the verger said they had not; 
but he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly 
in a limp sort on keeping the door locked so that people 
could not get away without his help, and must either 
fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple Church, 
indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cun- 
ningham says that the two edifices most worth visiting 
are the church and the Middle Temple Hall, which I 
now preferred luxuriously to leave in my remembrances 

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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party, 
straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the 
empty courts, and envying, not very actively, the 
lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking old brick dwell- 
ings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this 
day, but I am told they are practically of both sexes, 
and that when married they are allowed to domesticate 
themselves in these buildings in apartments sublet to 
them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law, 
but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are 
subject only to a semicentennial ejection, so that I do 
not know where a young literary couple could more 
charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children 
would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the 
Temple paths and on the Temple lawns. At one house, 
a girl was vaguely arriving with a band-box and parcels, 
and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint, remote 
date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash 
of our period came to us through the Strand gate soft- 
ened to a mellow roar. The noise was not great enough, 
we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman in court 
dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the 
top of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith's 
grave, and leaning forward with one hand extended 
as if, in the spirit of the present entente cordiale, he was 
calling our attention to the fact that the garlands and 
streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the 
walls about him were in the mother-clime of a real Amer- 
ican redness. 

It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else 
of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all 
our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that 
famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death 
of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble 

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remnant of that ancient palace of the Enghsh kings 
which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece 
of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, 
saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues 
of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as 
that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I 
must count that last day of our September in London 
as spent in such sort as to be of unsurpassed if not un- 
rivalled impression, because of the visit which we then 
so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we 
had almost not paid it at all. 

The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and 
naval museum; with the swords and saddles and uni- 
forms and other equipments of divers English heroes 
in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the two 
most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I 
was not so vain of my reading about battles as not 
to be glad of seeing how the men-of-war deployed at 
Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops were 
engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of 
the cannons' mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when 
Bliicher modestly appeared at one corner of the plan 
in time to save the day. "But we should 'ave 'ad it, 
without 'im?" a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously 
inquired of the custodian. "Oh, we should 'ave 'ad 
the victory, anyway," the custodian reassured him, and 
they looked together at some trophies of the Boer war 
with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I do 
not know whether they shared my psychological inter- 
est in that apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which, 
in this place, as in several others in England, invests 
the spiritual squalor of war-memories with the glamour 
of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities. 
Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers 



VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 

in their ideals shed such a light upon the sad business of 
their lives as almost to ennoble it. One feels that with 
a little more qualification on the creative side they could 
have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps, 
but, say, historical novelists. 

There is some question among other authorities 
which window of the Banquetting House the doomed 
king passed through upon the scaffold to the block; but 
the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a 
choice of windows, and as to a space broken through 
the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so 
well satisfied with his window as to shrink involunta- 
rily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal 
substance showed through the shadowy illusion of pass- 
ing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the 
street, the king's voice rising above the noises in ten- 
der caution to a heedless witness, " Have a care of the 
axe; have a care," and then gravely to the headsman: 
"When I stretch out my hands so, then — " The 
drums were ordered beaten, so that we could not hear 
more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs 
and 'busses to the horse - guards sitting shrunken on 
their steeds, and passed betw^een them into the park be- 
yond where the beds of flowers spread their soft au- 
tumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day. 



XI 

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

I LIKED walking through St. James's and through 
Green Park, especially in the late afternoon when 
the tired poor began to droop upon the benches, and, 
long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to 
strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face down- 
ward, among its odorous roots. There was often the 
music of military bands to which wide-spreading audi- 
ences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St. James's 
there were seats along the borders of the ponds where, 
while the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good 
deal of energetic courting went on. Besides, both were 
in the immediate neighborhood of certain barracks 
where there was always a chance of military, and were 
hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. 
But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers 
is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot, 
hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken 
that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and 
seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected 
to find in it, but these people though poor were not 
tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be 
better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class, 
and the women especially make a bolder attempt than 
ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put 
on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and 

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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The 
afternoon was sultry to breathlessness ; yet a young 
mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along 
in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she 
was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emu- 
lated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in 
which the great world was flitting and flirting at the 
same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the young 
fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of 
the swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled 
them in their aberrations from formality. 

There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the 
people to sit under, but there was almost a superabun- 
dance of flowers in glaring beds, and there were pieces 
of water, where the amateur boatman could have the 
admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely 
encircling the ponds. To watch them and to walk up 
and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on 
the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases 
to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, 
seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea 
Park could do. We ourselves ordered tea, knowing the 
quality and quantity of the public English ice, which is 
so very minute that you think it will not be enough, but 
which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want. 
The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and 
a crowd of envious small boys thronged the railing that 
parted us from the general public, till the spectacle of 
their hungry interest became intolerable. We con- 
sulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our 
question as to the moral and social effect of sixpence 
worth of buns on those boys; he decided that it would 
at least not form an example ruinous to the peace of his 
tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag 

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that seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even 
half a bushel of buns will not go round the boys m Bat- 
tersea Park, and we had to choose as honest a looking 
boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him 
to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and 
hope, as he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with 
the whole troop at his heels, that he would be faithful 
to the trust. 

So very mild are the excitements, so slight the inci- 
dents, so safe and tame the adventures of modern 
travel! I am almost ashamed when 1 think what a 
swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real 
imagination would have been having in London when 
so little was happemng to me. There was, indeed, one 
night after dinner when for a salient moment I had 
hopes of something different. The maid had whistled 
for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door 
where we stood waiting, when out of the shadows across 
the way two figures sprang, boarded the cab, and bade 
the cabman drive them away under our very eyes. 
Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o'clock, prom- 
ised a series of stirring experiences; and an American 
lady, long resident in England, encouragingly said, on 
hearing of the outrage, "Ah, that's London!^^ as if I 
might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the sort; 
but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the 
security and gentleness with which life is operated in 
the capital of the world is one of the kind things makes 
you forget its immensity. Your personal comfort and 
safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mis- 
take yourself for one of very few people instead of so 
many. 

London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and 

102 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

deliberation, and if it hurried or worried, it would be 
like the precession of the equinoxes getting a move 
on, and would shake the earth. The street events 
are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely 
spent in the streets, I saw the body of only one acci- 
dent worse than a cab-horse falling; but that was early 
in my stay when I expected to see many more. We 
were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and 
were walking by the hospital of the same name just 
as a cab drove up to its gate bearing the body of the 
accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face 
hung upon his breast and whose limp arm another 
young man of the same station in life held round his 
own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside him. 
A crowd was already following, and it gathered so 
quickly at the high iron fence that the most censorious 
witness could hardly see with what clumsiness the 
wounded man was half -dragged, half -lifted from the 
cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the 
ground till he could be duly carried into the hospital. 
It may have been a casualty of the many incident to 
alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single combat, 
which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediseval 
atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic 
dignity which would have come in the way of a more 
heroical imagination. 

It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however 
characteristic of the observer, that I made haste to 
forget it as I entered the church-yard under the Nor- 
man arch which has been foi' some years gradually 
finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole 
church, indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it 
was one of the first effects I saw) of that rescue of the 
past from the present which is perpetually going on all 
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LONDON FILMS 

over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and the 
crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an iron- 
worker's shop; and modern life still pressed close upon it 
in the houses looking on the graves of the grassless 
church-yard. With women at the windows that opened 
on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, 
and doing other household offices, the place was like 
something out of Dickens, but something that yet had 
been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of 
the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by 
arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than 
good before he turned monk) who founded the Cister- 
cian monastery there in the twelfth century would 
hardly have missed anything if he had returned to ex- 
amine the church. He would have had the advantage, 
which he could not have enjoyed in his life-time, of his 
own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and he might have 
been interested to note, as we did, that the painter Ho- 
garth had been baptized in his church six hundred years 
after his own time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent 
Norman architecture might have been less; it is possible 
he would have preferred the Gothic which was coming in 
when he went out. 

The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, 
dim, twilighted as with the closes of the days of a thou- 
sand years; and in the pale ray an artist sat sketching a 
stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a loss in 
not having looked to see how he was making out, but 
the image of the pew-opener remains compensatively 
with me. She was the first of her sort to confront me 
in England with the question whether her very intelligent 
comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. 
She was a little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca 
dress, and a world-old black bonnet, who spared us no 

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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

detail of the church, and took us last into the crypt, not 
long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now 
used as a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish, 
which is still full of the poor. The chapel was equipped 
with a large bier and tall candles, frankly ready for any 
of the dead who might drop in. The old countries do 
not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger 
countries do. 

We came out into the imperfect circle before the gate- 
way of the church, and realized that it was Smithfield, 
where all those martyrs had perished by fire that the 
faith of the world might live free. There can be no 
place where the past is more august, more pathetic, 
m.ore appealing, and none I suppose, where the activ- 
ities of the present, in view of it, are more offensive. 
It is all undermined with the railways that bring the 
day's meat-provision to London for distribution through- 
out the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm 
with butchers' wagons laden with every kind and color 
of carnage, prevalently the pallor of calves' heads, 
which seem so to abound in England that it is wonderful 
any calves have them on still. The wholesale market 
covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at 
some central point, you find yourself amid endless 
prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole car- 
casses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings, 
and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, 
so that you come away wishing to live a vegetarian ever 

after. 

The emotions are not at one's bidding, and if one calls 
upon them, they are very apt not to come. I promised 
myself some very signal ones, of a certain type, from 
going to the Sunday market of the Jews m what was 
once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning 

105 



LONDON FILMS 

up and clearing out of the slums, has got itself called 
by some much finer and worthier name. But, really, I 
had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on our 
own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I 
had been led to expect it would. The blazing forenoon 
of my visit was more than half gone, and yet there was 
no clothes' auction, which was said to be the great thing 
to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be every- 
thing else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long 
booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, 
fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and 
shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry finery, 
children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one an- 
other indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with 
an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill 
screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, 
slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently 
unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic 
crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means 
so marked as in New York, though there was a greater 
number of red Jews than I had noted before. The 
most monumental features of the scene were the gor- 
geous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals 
along the street, and arranged with seats, like swings, 
for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know 
their tonnage; apparently they have a passion for know- 
ing it. 

The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt 
its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that 
he questioned the poHcemen for some very squalid or 
depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in 
the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because 
the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned 
up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse 

106 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

hnt to take me on top of a tram-car and show me how 
very thotugWy it had been reformed and cleaned up. 
In Ir de the'whole length of Whit^chapel Road to where 

ronce iniquitous rejon ceased f^—^^J 'Z 
in a most respectable resurrection as Stepney, witti oiu 

ashirec houses which looked happy, h-mle- homes 
I ci only be bidden imagine avenues of m.qu ty 
brancWng off on either hand. But I actually saw noth- 
£ slumlke; indeed, with a current of cool east w md 

n'our fTces, which the motion of the tram -mforcec, tt.e 

wfl=> <:itill as much or more London beyond. 

Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than 
it used to be in the days before slummmg (now .tsel 
of Se pit) began to exploit it. _ At any rate I thought 
that in mv present London sojourn I found less un 
Su hing'estitution than in the more hopeless or more 
shamlss days of 1882-3. In those days I remem- 
berTeing taken by a friend, much concerned for my 
knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful 
Seu where I saw and heard and smelled thmgs qmte 
as bad as any that I did long afterwards m the over- 
tenanted regions of New York. My memory is still 
STted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who 
5ed bhnking from one hole in the wall to another, wi h 
httle OT nothing on, and of other creatures much m 
lauorld loudly scolding and quarreUing, with squahd 
S f idhood scattered about -derfoot, a.d vague 
Shanes of sickness and mutilation, and all ^^^ ^ime a 
Sn2 and selling of loathsome second - hand rags. 
She'mTdst of it'there stood, like figures of a monu- 



LONDON FILMS 

ment erected to the local genius of misery and dis- 
order, two burly figures of half-drunken men, threaten- 
ing each other with loud curses and shaken fists under 
the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes 
dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the 
throat-latch of his helmet. When the men should strike, 
I was aware that it would be his instant duty, as the 
guardian of the public peace, to seize them both and hale 
them away to prison. But it was not till many years 
afterwards that I read in his well-remembered efhgy 
the allegory of civiUzation which lets the man-made 
suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, 
and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is 
worth less than an ounce of cure. 

I would very willingly have seen something of this 
kind again, but, as I say, I happened not to see it. I 
think that I did not see or hear even so much simple 
drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may 
have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I 
had passed more gin-palaces, flaring through their hell- 
litten windows into the night; but this may have been 
because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did 
not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and 
coming out of such places in draggle-tailed processions 
in those wicked days; but now I only once saw women 
drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night, 
when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the 
thirst of the morrow, for all through the Sunday idle- 
ness it cannot be slaked enough. It was a hot night, 
and the bar-room door stood open, and within, fronted 
by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men- 
kind, those poor silly things stood drooping against the 
wall with their beer -pots dangling limply from their 
hands, and their mouths fallen open as if to catch the 

108 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the tongues 
of their admired male companions. They did not look 
very bad; bad people never do look as bad as they are, 
and perhaps they are sometimes not so bad as they look. 
Perhaps these were kind, but not very wise, mothers 
of families, who were merely relieving in that moment 
'of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's 
work. 1 may have passed and repassed in the street 
some of the families that they were the mothers of; 
it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose oppres- 
siveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to 
share with the reader, and the street children seemed 
to have been roused to uncommon vigilance by it. 
They played about far into the night, unrebuked by 
their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little 
girls were always lugging, shared their untimely wake- 
fulness if not their activity. There was seldom any 
crying among them then, though by day the voice of 
grief and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. 
If their mothers did not call them in-doors, their fathers 
were still less exacting. After the marketing, which 
took place in the neighboring avenue, where there began 
to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, 
father and mother alike seemed to have renounced their 
domestic cares and to have liberated their offspring to 
the unrestricted enjoyment of the street. 

As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see 
much of it, and I heard less, though that might have 
been because I did not look or listen in the right places. 
With that, as with everything else in London, I took 
my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports 
of a lady in Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of 
mutual friends from assaulting another lady. She, 
however, though she excelled in violence, did not equal 

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LONDON FILMS 

in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, 
long hour threatened an invisible bicyclist under our 
windows in that humbler quarter already described 
as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had apparently 
been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, 
in a moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned 
that he had not sounded the warning bell. In making 
this confession he had evidently apologized with his 
forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently 
forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the 
future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted 
his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped 
and brought back to the miserable error of his con- 
fession. The whole ground was then gone over again, 
and again pardon with warning was given. Even a 
glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman's voice 
rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he seemed 
to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before 
by the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up 
at the prospect of his escape. I do not know how the 
affair ended; perhaps it never ended; but exhausted 
nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its 
continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured 
person was, if not drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when 
the sensibilities are keenest and self-respect is most 
alert. An American could not, at least, have been so 
tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an 
Englishman could. 

It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative 
drunkenness of the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the 
hope and example of the human race in so many things, 
that much if not most of our American drunkenness is 
alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely native. 
If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early 

110 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

years of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous, 
were added to the sum of our home-born intoxication, 
there could be no doubt which was the greater. As it is, I 
am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more drunken 
men in London than in New York; and when I think 
of the Family Entrance, indicated at the side-door of 
every one of our thousands of saloons, I am not sure I 
can plume myself on the superior sobriety of our drink- 
ing men's wives. As for poverty — if I am still partially 
on that subject — as for open misery, the misery that 
indecently obtrudes itself upon prosperity and begs 
of it, I am bound to say that I have met more of it 
in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in 
London. Such misery may be more rigidly policed in 
the English capital, more kept out of sight, more quelled 
from asking mercy, but I am sure that in Fifth Avenue, 
and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between that 
avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more 
deserving or undeserving poverty has made itself seen 
and heard to my personal knowledge than in Piccadilly, 
or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane, or the squares 
and places which are the London analogues of oui' best 
residential quarters. 

Of course, the statistics will probably be against me — 
I have often felt an enmity in statistics — and I offer 
my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be 
sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of 
that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two 
further in behalf of my observations. After we returned 
to London, in September, I used to stroll much among 
the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass 
of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the 
omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours 
of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more 

111 



LONDON FILMS 

interesting than they probably were, either asleep or 
awake, and if I could really have got inside their minds 
I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I 
had penetrated the consciousness of as many people of 
fashion in the height of the season. But what I wish 
to say is that, w^hether sleeping or waking, they never, 
any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise inti- 
mated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered 
it myself, it was another thing, and it was not refused to 
the extent of a shilling by the good fellow whose conver- 
sation I bought one afternoon when I found him, sitting 
up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle 
and thread. I asked him of the times and their badness, 
and I hope I left him with the conviction that I believed 
him an artisan out of work, taking his misfortune brave- 
ly. He was certainly cheerful, and we had some agree- 
able moments, which I could not prolong, because I did 
not like waking the others, or such of them as might 
be sleeping. 

I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery 
to be cheerful seemed to be rather trivial, and I was bet- 
ter pleased with the impassioned bearing of a pair who 
passed me another day as I sat on one of the benches 
beside the path where the trees were dropping their 
hstless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I 
might judge from their having each a babe in their 
arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They 
were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely 
threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; 
they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to 
the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and 
pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate 
tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror 
which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the 

112 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

best effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a 
little way before I gained courage to speak to the man, 
who seemed to have been sick, and looked more miser- 
able, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I 
asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed 
in a ghastly pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his 
luck. He owned that he was, and in guarantee of his 
good faith took the shilling I offered him. If his need 
had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sov- 
ereign; but one must not fly in the face of the Providence, 
which is probably not ill-advised in choosing certain of us 
to be reduced to absolute destitution. The man smiled a 
sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his teeth in a sort of 
pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife, gloomily 
unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk 
back to my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had 
not embodied, society to her. 

I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest 
that came to my knowledge in London; but I do not 
insist that it was genuine, and if any more scientific 
student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my trag- 
edy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize 
the sentimental American stranger, and do him out of 
one of his ill-got shillings, I will not gainsay him. I 
merely maintain, as I have always done, that the condi- 
tions are alike in the Old World and the New, and that 
the only difference is in the circumstances, which may 
be better now in New York, and now in London, while 
the conditions are always bad everywhere for the poor. 
That is a point on which I shall not yield to any more 
scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time 
my light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to 
another pair on the grass of the slope not far off in 

front of me, 

113 



LONDON FILMS 

Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair 
of quite well-dressed young people had thrown them- 
selves, side by side, on the September grass as if it 
had been the sand at any American seashore, or the 
embrowned herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps 
the shelving ground was dryer than the moist levels 
where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but 
I do not think it would have mattered to that tender 
pair if it had been very damp; so warmly were they 
lapped in love's dream, they could not have taken 
cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their 
open-air love-making to that in public places at home, 
and contrast it with the decorum of Latin countries 
where nothing of the kind is known. If anything, 
English lovers of this type are franker than with us, 
doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the Eng- 
lish nature; and they seem to be of a better class. One 
day when I was sitting in a penny chair in Green Park, 
the agent of the company came and collected the rent 
of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely 
chosen an inconspicuous situation w^here I should not 
be found, and it was long past the end of the season, 
when no company should have had the heart to collect 
rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmur- 
ing, and as the young man who sold me a ticket good for 
the whole day at a penny, was obviously not pressed with 
business, I tried to recoup myself by a little conversation. 

*^I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I 
don't see many of your chairs occupied." 

"Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a 
few taken at night, sir — over there in the hollow." I 
looked a leading question, and he went on : " Young peo- 
ple come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet 

place and out of the w^ay." ^ 

114 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

"Oh yes Where they're not molested by the un- 
emDloved?" I oast a generalizing glance over the dead 
and wounded of the battle of life strewn about the 
grass of an adjacent space. 

"Well that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do 
nothing but sleep all day, and then after dark they get 
up and begin to prowl. They spy, some of em on the 
young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and black- 
mail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work 
if they could get it." 

I perceived that my friend was a capitahst, and i sus- 
pected him of bemg one of the directors of the penny- 
chair company. But perhaps he thought me a capi- 
al t, toTand fancied'that I would like to have h.m 
deer; the unemployed. Still he may have been ngh 
about the blackmailing; one must live, and the mnocen 
courage of open-air courtship in London offers occasions 
of wifful misconstruction. In a great city, the sense 
of being probably unnoted and unknown among is 
myriads must eventuate in much indifference to ones 
surroundings. How should a young couple on an 
omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the seat opposite 
could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which 
they renewed their love after some previous falling 



out? 

"But I was hurt, Will, dear. 
" Oh, I'm so sorry, dear." 
"Iknow, Will, dear." 
"But it's all right now, dear?' 



"Oh yes. Will, dear." 

Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it 
down; it ought to be sacred; and nothing but my ze^al 
in these social studies could make me profane it. Who 
would not have been the careless brute this young man 



LONDON FILMS 

must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweet- 
ness of such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on 
misbehavior. He was a nice-looking young fellow, but 
she was nicer, and in her tender eyes there seemed more 
wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to 
temper justice with mercy. 

Sometimes women do not know when to temper 
mercy with justice. I fancied this the error of the fond 
nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her peram- 
bulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the side- 
walk in order to keep up with the tall grenadier who 
marched with his head in the air, and let her make this 
show of being in his company, but not once looking at 
her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls 
are always with, the military, so that it is said to be 
comparatively easy to keep servants in the neighborhood 
of the barracks, or even in those streets that the troops 
habitually pass through, and may be conveniently 
gloated upon from attic-windows or basement areas. 
Probably much of the natural supremacy of the male of 
our species has been lost in all ranks of society through 
the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men 
in civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace 
on their coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely 
they could still knock women about as they used, and 
be all the more admired. It is a point w^orth consider- 
ing in the final adjustment of their mutual relations. 

A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory 
with those I eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus- 
top, was a silent pair I noted one day in St. Paul's. 
They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had apparently 
lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where 
every monument is more forbidding than another, and 
had sunk down on a seat by themselves, and were try- 

116 



GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER 

ing to get back a little courage by furtively holding 
each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of a 
human interest larger than any London characteristic. 
So, in a little different sort, was the rapture of a couple 
behind a tree on whom a friend of mine came suddenly 
in St. James's Park at the very moment when the eager 
he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who 
had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission, 
fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right; 
but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a 
'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way 
from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from 
the seat she had taken next him. The witness was 
going up to a dentist in that region, and professed that 
in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the furies 
of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after 
all. 



XII 

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

LONDON is so manifold (as I have all along been 
i saying) that it would be advisable, if one could, to 
see it in a sort of severalty, and take it in the successive 
strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it could 
best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans; 
then one could give himself to its political or civic in- 
terest, another to its religious memories and associa- 
tions, another to its literary and artistic records ; no one 
American, however cultivated, could do justice to all 
these claims, even with life and health of an expectation 
beyond that of the most uncultivated American. Be- 
sides this suggestion I should like to offer a warning, and 
this is, that no matter with what devoted passion the 
American lover of London approaches her he must not 
hope for an exclusive possession of her heart. If she 
is insurpassably the most interesting, the most fascinat- 
ing of all the cities that ever were, let him be sure that 
he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it, but 
he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival 
before him in devotion to any aspect of her divinity. 
It is not for nothing that poets, novelists, historians, 
antiquarians have been born in England for so many 
ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of 
her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wall- 
spaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described 

118 



TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full 
of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the 
American, come he never so numerously, will find out- 
numbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of 
hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their islands I 
had occasion to observe how fond the English were of 
English travel and English objects of interest, and 
wherever I went in London there were Englishmen 
elbowing me from the front rank, not rudely, not un- 
kindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an 
alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been 
used as a foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at 
shrines of the beautiful or memorable. I do not know 
how it is now, but in those days there was nothing in 
the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza, 
or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for 
Rome, there was no such thing as doing as the Romans 
do in such places, because there w^ere apparently no 
Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty 
of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about Lon- 
don far greater than you can ever inspire them with for 
New York. 

Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which 
they must have been visiting all their lives, there were, 
at least, a thousand Englishmen for every cultivated 
American we could make sure of when we went there; 
and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to 
the general public, this overwhelming majority of natives 
must have come on orders from Fellows of the Society 
such as we had supposed would admit us much more 
selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded, 
and if it had been, still it would have been delightful 
on a summer afternoon, of that hovering softness, half- 
cloud, half-sun, which the London sky has the patent 

9 119 



LONDON FILMS 

of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with their 
may, were Uke cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it 
then was and would be at sunset; and there was a den- 
sity of grass underfoot and foliage overhead in which 
one's own childhood found itself again, so that one felt 
as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange 
beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years 
old. But I cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the 
same degree, and so had better not insist upon the 
animals; the herds of elephants, the troops of lions 
and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the 
mass-meetings of anthopoid apes. Above and beyond 
these in their strangeness w^ere the figures of humanity 
representative of the globe-girdling British empire, in 
their drawers and turbans and their swarthy skins, 
who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me, 
in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien 
shapes in Central Park, but there they are somehow at 
once less surprising and less significant than these 
Asian and African forms; they will presently be Amer- 
icans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperial- 
ings were already British and eternally un-English. 
They frequented the tea - tables spread in pleasant 
shades and shelters, and ate buns and bread-and-butter, 
like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes 
roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English 
complexions with an effect of mystery irreconcilable 
forever with the matter-of-fact mind behind their bland 
masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos, 
Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them 
so that we were faint for the tea from which they kept 
us at the crowded tables in the gardens or on the ve- 
randas of the tea-houses. But we were not so insatiable 
of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British 

120 



TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

whom one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special 
advantage. Our Sunday was in the season, and the sea- 
son had conjecturably quahfied it, so that one could 
sometimes feel oneself in company better than one's own. 
The children were well-dressed and admirably well-be- 
haved; they justly outnumbered their elders, and it was 
obviously their day. But it was also the day of their 
elders, who had made excuse of the children's pleasure 
in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were 
not so much their elders, and the young aunts and 
uncles, who were naturally cousins, lost themselves at 
times a little way from the children and maids, in the 
quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the 
tranquil waters with one another. They were then 
more interesting than the strangest Malays and Hindoos, 
and I wonder what these made of them, as they con- 
templated their segregation with the other thronging 
spectators. 

We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo; 
we were there quite voluntarily; but among the places 
which we promised ourselves not to visit again were the 
South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery; 
and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith 
with ourselves in regard to the last. We went^ to it 
again not once, but several times, and always with an 
increasing sense of its transcendent representativity.^ It 
is not merely that for all the schools of painting it^ is 
almost as good as going to the continental countries 
where they flourished, and is much easier. It is not 
only that for English history, as it lives in the portrait- 
ure of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courte- 
sans and heroes and statesmen, it is the past made per- 
sonal to the beholder and forever related to himself, 
as if he had seen those people in the flesh. It is, 

121 



LONDON FILMS 

above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms 
crowded with the pictures and statues and busts of the 
Enghshmen who have made England England in every 
field of achievement that is oppressively, almost crush- 
ingly wonderful. Before that swarming population 
of poets, novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of 
painters, sculptors, architects; of astronomers, mathe- 
maticians, geologists, physicians; of philosophers, theolo- 
gians, divines; of statesmen, politicians, inventors, act- 
ors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great 
of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but 
must dwindle in number till our past seems as thinly 
peopled as our continent. It is in these rooms that the 
grandeur of England, historically, resides. You may, 
if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, 
and at some point find her less great than the greatest 
of her overgrown or overgrowing daughters, but from 
the presence of that tremendous collectivity, that pop- 
ulous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census 
can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in 
the welcome obscurity to which you plunge among the 
millions of her capital, that in all-round greatness we 
have hardly even the imagination of her transcendence. 
AVell towards fifty years had passed between my first 
and last visits to London, but I think I had kept for it 
throughout that long interval much more of the earlier 
sentiment than for any other city that I have known. 
I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that 
this sentiment was continuous through the smell of the 
coal -smoke, or that the smoke formed a solution in 
which all associations were held, and from which they 
were, from time to time, precipitated in specific mem- 
ories. The peculiar odor had at once made me at home 
in London, for it had probably so saturated my first 

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consciousness in the little black, smoky town on the 
Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a 
most intimate element when I now inhaled it. But 
apart from this personal magic, the London smoke has 
always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is 
mostly the smoke which gives "atmosphere," softens 
outlines, tenderly blurs forms, makes near and far the 
same, and intenerisce il cuore, for any him whose infant 
sense it bathed. No doubt it thickens the constant 
damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog ; but it is 
over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objection- 
able, it is wholly deplorable, indeed, when it descends 
in those sooty particles, the blacks; but in all my London 
sojourns I have had but one experience of the blacks, 
and I will not condemn the smoke because of them. It 
gives a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sun- 
rises and the early winter sunsets, the beauty of which 
dwells still in my mind from my first London sojourn. 
In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the noons to 
the softest effulgence ; in the summer it was a veil in the 
air which kept the flame of the heated term from doing 
its worst. It hung, diaphonous, in the dusty perspec- 
tives, but it gathered and thickened about the squares 
and places, and subdued all edges, so that nothing cut 
or hurt the vision. 

I was glad of that, because I found one of my greatest 
pleasures in looking at the massed tree-forms in those 
gardened - groves, which I never penetrated. The 
greater parks are open to the public, but the squares 
are enclosed by tall iron fences, and locked against the 
general with keys of which the particular have the keep- 
ing in the houses about them. It gave one a fine shiver 
of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look through their 
barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while 

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their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over 
the trim walks. Sometimes it was even young ladies 
who sat reading, or, at the worst, governesses. But 
commonly the squares were empty, though the grass 
so invited the foot, and the benches in the border of the 
shade, or round the great beds of bloom, extended their 
arms and spread their welcoming laps for any of the par- 
ticular who would lounge in them. 

I remember only one of these neighborhood gardens 
which was open to the public, and that was in the poor 
neighborhood which we lodged on the edge of, equally 
with the edge of Belgravia. It was opened, by the 
great nobleman who owned nearly the whole of that 
part of London, on all but certain days of the week, 
with restrictions lettered on a board nearly as big as the 
garden itself; but I never saw it much frequented, per- 
haps because I usually happened upon it when it was 
locked against its beneficiaries. Upon the whole, these 
London squares, though they flattered the eye, did not 
console the spirit so much as the far uglier places in 
New York, or the pretty places in Paris, which are free 
to all. It can be said for the English way that when 
such places are free to all they are not so free to some, 
and that is true. In this world you have to exclude 
either the many or the few, and in England it is rather 
the many who are excluded. Being one of those shut 
out, I did not like the English way so well as ours, but 
if I had had keys to those locks, I should not now dare 
ask myself which principle I should have preferred. It 
would have been something like choosing between popu- 
lar government and family government after having 
been created one of the governing families. 

Life, I felt, would be sensibly dignified if one could 
spend some months of every year of it in a mansion 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

looking down into the leafy tops of those squares. 
One's mansion might not always have the company of 
the most historical or patrician mansions; sometimes 
these are to be found in very unexpected and even in- 
conspicuous places; but commonly the associated dwell- 
ings would be ample, if not noble. They would rarely 
be elbowed by those structures, not yet quite so frequent 
in London as in New York, which lift themselves in an 
outer grandeur unsupported by the successive levels 
of the social pretence within. I should say that with 
the English, more than with us, the perpendicular is 
still socially superior to the horizontal domestication. 
Yet the London flats are of more comfortable and taste- 
ful arrangement than ours. They are better lighted 
always, never having (as far as I know) dark rooms 
blindly staring into airless pits; and if they are not so 
well heated, that is because the English do not wish, 
or at least expect, to be heated at all. The elevator is 
not so universal as with us, but the stairways are easier 
and statelier. The public presence of the edifice is 
statelier, too; but if you come to state, the grandest of 
these buildings must deny its denizens the splendor of 
flunkeys standing before its door, on a day or night of 
social function, as one sees them standing by the steps 
or portals of some mansion that houses a single family. 
To which of the flat-dwellers would they be supposed 
to belong, if they grouped themselves at the common 
entrance? For anything specific in their attendance 
they might almost as well be at the next street-corner. 
rTime and again, in these pages, I have paid my duty, 
which has been my grateful pleasure, to the birds which 
haunt the squares, and sing there. You are not obliged 
to have a householder's key in order to hear them; and 
when the hawthorns and the horse-chestnuts blossomed 

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you required a proprietorial right as little. Somehow, 
my eye and ear always disappointed themselves in the 
absence of rooks from such places. My senses ought to 
have been better instructed than to expect rooks in 
London, but they had been so educated to the sight and 
sound of rocks everywhere else in England that they 
mechanically demanded them in town. I do not even 
know what birds they were that sang in the spaces; 
but I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply 
edging their song next the street; and where the squares 
were reduced to crescents, or narrow parallelograms, 
or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect that this 
edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so 
densely interwoven in the squares. 

I have spoken hitherto of that passion for dress to 
which all the womanhood of England has so bewitch- 
ingly abandoned itself, and which seemed to have reached 
an undue excess in the housemaid in a bolero hat and a 
trained skirt, putting that white on the front steps 
which is so universal in England that if the sun missed 
it after rising he might instantly go down again in the 
supposition that it was still night. It must always be a 
woman who whitens the steps ; if a man-servant were to 
do it any such dreadful thing might happen as would 
follow his blacking the boots, which is alienably a female 
function. Under the circumstances one hears much 
of the general decay of excellence in woman-servants in 
London. They are far less amiable, patient, respectful, 
and faithful than when their mistresses were young. 
This may be from the fact that so many more employ- 
ments besides domestic service seem to be open to girls. 
Apparently very young girls are preferred in the innu- 
merable postal-stations, if one may judge from the chil- 
dren of tender years who sell you stamps, and take your 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

telegrams and register your letters. I used at first to 
tremble for a defective experience, if not a defective in- 
telligence in them, but I did not find them inadequate 
to their duties through either. Still their employment 
was so phenomenal that I could not help remarking 
upon it. None of my English friends seemed to have 
noticed it, till at last one, who had noticed it, said he 
believed it was because the government found them 
cheap, and was in that way helping repay itself for the 
enormous expenses of the Boer War. 

In the London shops I did not think women were so 
generally employed as in our own, or those of the Con- 
tinent. But this may have been a conclusion from 
careless observation. In the book-stores to which I 
most resorted, and which I did not think so good as 
ours, I remember to have seen but one saleswoman. 
Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large stores 
where women's goods, personal and household, are 
sold, and which I again did not think comparable to 
ours. Seldom in any small shop, or even book-stall or 
newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge. 
But at the street - markets, especially those for the 
poorer customers, market-women were the rule. I 
should say, in fine, that woman was a far more domes- 
tic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the 
beast of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German 
cities great or small ; but I am not going to sentimental- 
ize her lot in England. Probably it is only compara- 
tively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and 
lowest its hardship is attested by the stunted stature, 
and the stunted figure of the ordinary English lower- 
class woman. Even among the elect of the afternoon 
parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great 
an average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show 

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with us, where they form the patriciate which our plu- 
tocracy has already flowered into. But there was a 
far greater average of tall young men than with us; 
which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a 
masculine distinction. 

As for those great department stores with which the 
question of women relates itself inevitably, I have cur- 
sorily assumed our priority in them, and the more I 
think of them, the more I am inclined to believe m3^self 
right. But that is a matter in which women only may 
be decisive; the nice psychology involved cannot be 
convincingly studied by the other sex. I will venture, 
again, however, so far into this strange realm as to say 
that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so 
good in London as in New York, though when one re- 
members the two Bond Streets, and Oxford, and lower 
Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of claiming 
superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty- 
third streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts 
of Third and Sixth avenues to which ladies' shopping 
has spread. After all, perhaps there is but one London, 
in this as in some other things. 

^ Among the other things are hardly the restaurants 
which abound with us, good, bad, and indifferent. In 
the affair of public feeding, of the costUest, as well as 
the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot menus, 
safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in 
the world, not to say the universe. It is not only that 
we make the openest show of this feeding, and parade 
it at windows, whereas the English retire it to curtained 
depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it ubiq- 
uitously, perpetually. In both London and New York 
it is exotic for the most part, or, at least, on the higher 
levels, and the administration is in the hands of those 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

foreigners who take our money for learning English 
of us. But there is no such range of Italian and French 
and German restaurants in London as in New York, 
and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so 
good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be 
English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive 
in expression; in everything culinary the island touch 
seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far 
from home, when the lunch came prematurely, we 
found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and 
our wicked hope was in a little Italian trattoria which 
opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial 
effect as an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blos- 
soms. There was a strictly English company within, 
and the lunch was to the English taste, but the touch 
was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the 
Tiber or on the Riva degli Schiavoni. 

At the great restaurants, where one may see fashion 
lunching, the kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration 
with Sherry's or Delmonico's, but the entourage was less 
oppressively glaring, and the service had more moments 
of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a prin- 
cipal part of the drama. That is often the case with 
us in the simpler sort of eating-houses, where it is the 
neat hand of Phyllis that serves rather than that of the 
white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of either color 
or any nationality. My profoundest and distinctest 
impression of Phyllidian service is from a delightful 
lunch which I had one golden noonday in that famous 
and beautiful house, Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, which 
remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in 
which Sir John Crosby proudly built it from his grocer's 
and woolman's gains in 1466. It had afterwards added 
to it the glory of lodging Richard III., who, both as 

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protector and as sovereign-prince made appointments 
there, in Shakespeare's tragedy of him, for the Lady 
Anne, for Catesby, and for the "First Murderer," whom 
he praises for his thoughtfulness in coming for the 
"warrant," that he might be admitted to their victim. 

"Well thought upon; I have it here about me. 
When you have done, repair to Crosby place." 

Probably the First Murderer lunched there, four hundred 
years ago, "when he had done as I did now"; but, 
in the mean time, Henry VIIL had given Crosby Place 
to a rich Italian merchant, one Anthony Bonvice; 
later, ambassadors had been received in it; the first 
Earl of Northampton had enlarged it, and dwelt in it 
as lord mayor; in 1638 the East India Company had 
owned it, and later yet, in 1673, it was used for a Pres- 
byterian meeting-house; but in 1836 it was restored to 
its ancient form and function. I do not know how long 
it has been an eating-house, but I hope it may long 
remain so, for the sensation and refreshment of Amer- 
icans who love a simple and good refection in a mediaeval 
setting, at a cost so moderate that they must ever after- 
wards blush for it. You penetrate to its innermost 
perpendicularity through a passage that enclosed a 
"quick-lunch" counter, and climb from a most noble 
banquet-hall crammed with hundreds of mercantile 
gentlemen "feeding like one" at innumerable little 
tables, to a gallery where the musicians must have sat 
of old. There it was that Phyllis found and neat- 
handedly served my friend and me, gently experiencing 
a certain difficulty in our combined addition, but mas- 
tering the arithmetical problem presently, and taking 
our tip with an air of surprise which it never created in 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

any of the English-learning Swiss, French, or Italian 
Strephons who elsewhe e ministered to us. 

The waitresses at Crosby Place were of a girlish dig- 
nity which never expected and was never visibly offered 
the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that 
strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens 
of thousands of London public-houses she stands with 
her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banal- 
ities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim 
regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness 
against her background of bottles and decanters; but 
the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior 
as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel ; 
and I thought it to the honor of the lunchers that they 
seemed all to know it. The gentle influence of her 
presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood 
where, another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was 
misled by the mediieval aspect of the entrance, and 
where I found waitresses again instead of waiters.. But 
nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting 
the manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those 
repeated A. B. C. cokl-lunch places of the Aerated Bread 
Company, where a chill has apparently been imparted 
to their bearing by the temperature of the food they 
serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be 
rather that a New England severity in them is the 
effect of the impersonal relation of served and server 
which no gratuity humanizes. 

It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the 
employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres. 
Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose 
glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it 
is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds him- 
self asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the pro- 

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gramme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the 
play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been 
always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, six- 
pence for their programmes and feel no asperity at being 
so plundered. The true explanation may be found, 
after all, in the discovery, akin to the government's, that 
their service is cheaper than men ushers' would be. 
Children of as tender years as those who manage the 
postal-stations, go round with tea and coffee between 
the acts, as with us the myriad-buttoned ice-water boy 
passes; but whereas this boy returns always with a 
tray of empty glasses, I never saw a human being drink 
either the tea or coffee offered by those female infants 
in any London theatre. 

Let it be not supposed, however, that I went much 
to London theatres. I went perhaps half a dozen times 
in as many weeks. Once settled in my chair, I might 
well have fancied myself at home in a New York theatre, 
except that the playing seemed rather better, and the 
English intonation not quite so scrupulously English 
as that which our actors have produced after a con- 
scientious study of the original. I heard that the Eng- 
lish actors had studied the American accent for a play 
imported from us; but I did not see this play, and I 
am now very sorry. The American accent, at least, 
must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from 
the reproductions of our parlance which I heard in 
private life by people who had sojourned, or merely 
travelled, among us. These were so unfailingly delight- 
ful, that one could not have wished them more like. 

The arriving and departing of theatre-goers by night 
adds sensibly to the brilliancy of the complexion of 
London. The flare of electricity in the region of the 
theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

of September, and recalled the gayety of the season 
for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this 
splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even 
in the height of the season it was one of the things that 
distinguished itself among the various immense impres- 
sions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to 
characterize them, transitory; they were effects of ad- 
ventitious circumstances; they were not structural in 
their origin. The most memorable aspect of the Strand 
or Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately 
architecture, but its moments of fog or mist, when its 
meanest architecture would show stately. The city 
won its moving grandeur from the throng of people astir 
on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying 
or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of 
Westminster and Parliament did not seem in them- 
selves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of 
night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative 
emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the 
proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Traf- 
algar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being? 
It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow 
the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the 
Place de la Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with 
its suggestions of old steel-engravings of Athens. Of 
course St. Paul's has a prodigious opportunity, as the 
multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its 
fagade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for 
bit, there is not quite any bit in London like that edi- 
fice of smutted Greek on which the newly arrived 
American looks from his breakfast-table in his Liverpool 
hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far from 
thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to 
the London architecture. Pure white marble is all very 

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well, and the faint rose that the stone takes from a 
thousand years of ItaUan sunsets is not bad; but the 
black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul's lends wall and 
dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the elec- 
tric glare of tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches 
the columns which rise, more or less casually as it seems, 
from the London streets and squares, and one almost 
hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the 
fronts of the aristocratic mansions. It is like having 
an old picture restored; perhaps it has to be done, but 
it is a pity. 

The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of 
large houses of the proudest nobility in the world, are 
by no means overwhelming. They hold their primacy 
among the other pieces of domestic architecture, as their 
owners hold their primacy in society, very quietly, if 
very stolidly, and one would have, I fancy, to come 
much harder against them than one would be allowed 
to do, in order to feel their quality intimately. There 
they are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of 
Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, 
and the different squares and gardens and places; 
and certain of them may be visited at certain times 
on application by the tourist. But that is a barren 
pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the 
simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The 
charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great 
houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now 
and then such a house gave evidence of high social 
preparation during the season in flinging out curtained 
galleries or pavilions towards the street, if it stood back; 
if it stood flush upon the sidewalk a group of fifteen or 
twenty flunkeys, and the continual arrest of carriages 
would attest its inward state ; but the genius of the race 

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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS 

is to keep its own to itself, even its own splendors and 
grandeurs, except on public occasions when it shines 
forth in incomparable magnificence. 

If London, then, is not habitually grandiose, or mon- 
umental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with 
much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that 
it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery, 
curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers every- 
where mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of 
birds heard through the staccato of cabs, and the muffled 
bellow of omnibuses. You may not like London, but 
you cannot help loving it. The monuments, if I may 
keep coming back to them, are plain things, often, with 
no attempt upon the beholder's emotions. In the proc- 
ess of time, I suspect that the Albert Memorial will not 
be the most despised among them, for it expresses, even 
if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat 
stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does 
not stand mum, like the different shy, bashful columns 
stuck here and there, and not able to say what they 
would be at. 

If one comes to the statues there are, of course, none 
so good as the Farragut in Madison Square, or the Logan 
on the Lake front at Chicago, and, on the whole, I remem- 
ber those at Washington as better. There are not so 
many English kings standing or riding about as one 
would expect; the English kings have, indeed, not been 
much to brag of in bronze or marble, though in that I 
do not say they are worse than other kings. I think, 
but I am not sure, that there are rather more public 
men of inferior grade than kings, though this may be 
that they were more impressive. Most noticeable was 
the statue of Disraeli, which, on Primrose Day, I saw 
much garlanded and banked up with the favorite flower 

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of that peculiarly rustic and English statesman. He 
had the air of looking at the simple blossoms and for- 
bearing an ironical smile; or was this merely the fancy 
of the spectator? Among the royal statues is that of 
the Charles whom they put to death, and who was so 
unequal in character though not in spirit to his dread 
fate. It was stolen away, and somewhere long hid by 
his friends or foes, but it is now to be seen in the collec- 
tion of Trafalgar Square, so surely the least imposing 
of equestrian figures that it is a pity it should ever 
have been found. For a strikingly handsome man, all 
his statues attest how little he lent himself to sculpture. 
Not far away is another equestrian statue, which 
never failed to give me a start, when I suddenly came 
upon it in a cab. It looked for an instant quite like 
many statues of George Washington, as it swept the air 
with its doffed hat, but a second glance always showed 
it the effigy of George the Third, bowing to posterity 
with a gracious eighteenth-century majesty. If it were 
possible, one would like to think that the resemblance 
mentioned had grown upon it, and that it in the case 
of Americans was the poor king's ultimate concession 
to the good -feeling which seems to be reuniting the 
people he divided. 



XIII 
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

THE amiable afternoon of late April which we chose 
for going to Hampton Court, made my return to 
the place after an interval of twenty odd years, a sort 
of triumphal progress by embowering the course of our 
train with plum and pear and cherry trees in a white 
mist of bloom. Long before we reached the country 
these lovely apparitions abounded in the back-yards of 
the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran 
between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely 
flowers; when we got to open expanses where nature 
could find room to spread in lawns that green English 
turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies and sunny 
with dandelions. The poets used to call that sort of 
thing enamelling, and it was not distasteful, in our ap- 
proach to such a kindly, artificial old place as Hampton 
Court, to suppose that we were passing through enam- 
elled meads. Under the circumstances we might have 
expected our train to purl, in default of a stream to 
perform the part, and I can truly say of it that it arrived 
with us in a mood so pastoral that I still cannot under- 
stand why we did not ask for a fly at the station in a 
couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our 
prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our 
taking it for the little distance to the palace, which it 
would have been so much pleasanter to walk. 

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Yet, I do not know but we were instinctively wise in 
coming to the entrance of the fine old paved court- 
yard with a certain suddenness: if we had left it much 
more time the grass between the bricks might have over- 
grown them, and given an air of ruin to precincts that 
for centuries have been held from decay, in the keeping 
of life at once simple and elegant. Though Hampton 
Court has never been the residence of the English kings 
since the second George gave the third George an en- 
during disgust for it by boxing the ears of the boy 
there in a fit of grandfatherly impatience, it has been 
and is the home of many English gentlefolk, rarely 
privileged, in a land of rare privileges, to live in apart- 
ments granted them by royal favor. In former times 
the privilege was now and then abused by tenants who 
sublet their rooms in lodgings; but the abuse has long 
been broken up, and now there cannot be, in the whole 
earth, a more dignified dwelling for the dowager of a 
distinguished or merely favored family than such as the 
royal pleasure freely grants at Hampton Court. Doubt- 
less the crumpled rose-leaf is there, as it is everywhere, 
but unless it is there to lend a faint old-fashioned odor 
as of pot-pourri to life in those apartments, I do not be- 
lieve that it abounds in any of them. 

The things I had chiefly in mind from my former 
visit were the beauties of the Stuarts' time, and of Sir 
Peter Lely's pencil, in the galleries of the palace, and the 
secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar place in a 
corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid 
my devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly 
declare that I did not find it looking a day older since 
I had seen it last in 1882. It could hardly have said 
as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two 
himdred years old to begin with, and consoled myself 

138 



AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so 
young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think 
it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish 
to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the 
unaging antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this 
moment be glad to share the youthful spirit of the 
sunken garden which I passed on my way to the famous 
vine, and in which with certain shapes of sculpture and 
blossom, I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor- 
vitse in the taste of a world more childlike than ours, and 
at the same time so much older. The Dutch taste of it 
all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from the 
Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by 
the good William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly 
good in comparison with all their predecessors from 
Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the 
Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in 
that long arbor of clipped wych-elms, near the sunken 
garden, called Mary's bower, which, on our April after- 
noon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs to 
break into leaf. 

We did not penetrate its perspective, for it seems 
one of the few things at Hampton Court barred to the 
public. Everywhere else the place is free to the visit- 
or, who may walk as he pleases on its garden - paths, 
or over its close-woven turf, or sit out of the sun under 
its dense black yews, or stroll beneath the oaks by the 
banks of the Long Canal. If the canal is Dutch, the 
burly trees which lounge about at their pleasure in the 
park, impart the true English sentiment to the scene; 
but, for my part, I did not care to go far from the bor- 
ders of the beds of hyacinths and tulips and daffodils. 
The grass sighed with secret tears under the foot, and 
it was better to let the fancy, which would not feel the 

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need of goloshes, rove disembodied to the bosky depths 
into which the oaks thickened afar, dim amid the vapor- 
laden air. From the garden-plots one could look, dry- 
shod, down upon the Thames, along which the pretty 
town of Hampton stretches, and in whose lively current 
great numbers of house-boats tug at their moorings. The 
Thames beside the palace is not only swift but wide, 
and from the little flowery height on which we sur- 
veyed these very modernest of pleasure-craft they had a 
remove at which they were lost in an agreeable mystery. 
Even one which we were told belonged to a rich Amer- 
ican could not alienate itself from the past when there 
were no United States, and very few united colonies. 
The poorest American, if he could not have a lodgement 
in the palace (and I do not see how the royal bounty 
could extend to one of our disinherited condition), or 
one of the pleasant Hampton houses overlooking the 
river, might be glad to pass the long, mild English 
summer, made fast to the willowy bank of the Thames, 
without mosquitoes or malaria to molest him or make 
him afraid in his dreamful sojourn. 

By all the laws of picturesque dealing with other times 
the people whose portraits we had seen in the galleries 
ought to have been in the garden or about the lawns 
in hospitable response to the interest of their trans- 
Atlantic visitors; but in mere common honesty, I must 
own they were not. They may have become tired of 
leaving their frames at the summons of the imagina- 
tions which have so often sought to steal their color for 
a dull page, and to give the charm of their tragedy or 
comedy to a passage which otherwise would not move. 
I do not blame them, and I advise the reader not to 
expect a greater complaisance of them than we experi- 
enced. But in all that densely -storied England, where 

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

every scene has memories accumulated one upon an- 
other till the sense aches under them, I think there is 
none that surpasses, if any vies with this. 

What makes the charm of Hampton Court is that from 
first to last it lies in an air clearer of fable or tradition 
than that which involves most other seats of power. For 
we do like to know what we are dealing with, in the past 
as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves 
real, we love reality in other people, whether they still 
live or whether they died long ago. If they were people 
of eminence, we gratify in supreme degree the inextin- 
guishable passion for good society innate in every one 
by consorting with royalties and titles whom we may 
here know as we know our contemporary equals, through 
facts and traits even better ascertained. At Hamp- 
ton Court we are really at home with the great parvenu 
who began the palace in such magnificence that none 
of the successive princes have excelled it in design, and 
who when his fear of the jealous tyrant compelled him 
to offer it to his king, could make such a gift as no sub- 
ject ever before laid at the feet of a sovereign. The 
grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry 
VIII., in the sufferance and the performance of that 
extortion are as sensible in the local air as if they were 
quaUties of some event in our own day, and the details 
of the tyrant's life in the palace remain matters of as 
clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the 
recent taking off of the Servian king and queen. The 
annals are so explicit that no veil of uncertainty hangs 
between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the 
throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard as in 
an instantaneous photograph escaping from her prison- 
chamber and running through the gallery to implore 
the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if a 

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phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched 
woman's screams when she is pursued and seized and 
carried back, while the king continues devoutly in 
the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward VI. 
relates itself as distinctly to the palace where he was 
born; and one is all but personally witness there to 
the strange episode of Elizabeth's semi- imprisonment 
while Bloody Mary, now sister and now sovereign, 
balanced her fate as from hand to hand, and hesi- 
tated whether to make her heiress to a throne or to a 
crown of martyrdom. She chose wisely in the end, for 
Elizabeth was fitter for mortal than immortal glory; 
and for the earthly fame of Mary Queen of Scots Eliza- 
beth in her turn did not choose unwisely, however un- 
wittingly, when amid her coquetting and counselling 
with her statesmen and lovers at Hampton Court she 
drew the toils closer and closer about her victim. But 
here I ought to own that all this is a reflected light 
from after - reading, and not from my previous knowl- 
edge of the local history. In making my confession, 
however, I am not sure that the sort of general ig- 
norance I brought to it was not a favorable medium 
through which to view Hampton Court. If you come 
prepared with the facts, you are hampered by them and 
hindered in the enjoyment of the moment's chances. 
You are obliged to verify them, from point to point, 
but if you learn them afterwards you can arrange them 
in your memories of the scene, where you have wandered 
vaguely about in a liberal and expansive sense of un- 
limited historical possibilities. I am able now to realize, 
without having missed one charm of our spring after- 
noon in those entrancing bounds that the son of Mary 
Stuart was as fond of Hampton Court, when he came 
there king, as EUzabeth herself. 

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

It was there that James I. confronted and confuted 
the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their com- 
plaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow- 
beating so hammered their hard metal that he tem- 
pered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his 
son ; it was there that Charles began the famous quarrel 
with his queen which ended in his deporting Henrietta 
Maria's French adherents, or, as he wrote Buckingham, 
" dryving them away, lyke so many wylde beastes . . . 
and soe the Devill goe with them"; it was there that 
more importantly when an honorable captive of Parlia- 
ment, he played fast and loose, after the fashion he 
was born to, with Cromwell and the other generals 
who would have favored his escape, and even his restora- 
tion to the throne, if they could have found any truth 
in him to rest a treaty on. It was at Hampton that 
Cromwell, when the palace became his home, first put 
on something of royal state, always with lapses through 
his bonhomie into good-fellowship with his officers, and 
never with any help from his simple-hearted wife; that 
the death of his daughter, amid these fitful glories, broke 
his heart, and he drooped and sickened to his own end, 
which a change to the different air of Whitehall did not 
delay; that after the little time of Richard Cromwell's 
protectorate, Hampton Court had another royal lord in 
the second Charles, who repeated history in a quarrel 
with his queen, for none of the good reasons which the 
first Charles had in the like contention. The father's 
tergiversations with Cromwell may be supposed to have 
given a glamour of kingcraft to his sojourn later, but the 
bad part which the son took against his wife was without 
one dignifying circumstance. One reads with indigna- 
tion still hot how he brought the plain little Portuguese 
woman there for their honeymoon, and brightened it 

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for her by thrusting upon her the intimacy of his mis- 
tress Lady Castlemaine; how he was firm for once in his 
yielding Hfe, when he compelled Clarendon to the base 
office of coaxing and frightening the queen who had 
trusted the old man as a father; how, like the godless 
blackguard he was, the "merry monarch," swore "before 
Almighty God," in his letter to the chancellor, that he 
was "resolved to go through with this matter" of forcing 
his paramour upon his wife, with the added threat, 
" and whomsoever I find my Lady Castlemaine's enemy" 
in it, "I do promise upon my word to be his enemy 
as long as I live." It is less wonderful that the im- 
happy creature whose spirit he broke should have been 
crushed, than that the English people, to whom the king's 
bad life was an open book, should have suffered him. 
But perhaps, even this was less wonderful than their 
patience with the harsh virtue of the Puritans. It is 
not well to be good, or make others be good at the cost 
of every ease and grace of life, and though it seems 
strange and sad to us republicans that the mighty 
English commonwealth should have been supplanted 
by such a monarchy as that restored in Charles, it may 
not be so strange as it was sad. The life which attests 
itself in the beauties of Lely and of Kneller on the walls 
of Hampton Court, when it began to have its free course 
was doubtless none the purer for having been frozen at 
its source. The world is a long time being saved from 
itself, and it has had to go back for many fresh starts. 
If the beautiful women whose wickedness is recorded 
by the court painters in a convention of wanton looks, 
rather than by a severally faithful portraiture, can be 
regarded simply as a part of the inevitable reaction 
from a period when men had allowed women to be 
better, we shall not have so much difficulty in showing 

144 



AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

them mercy. If only after a lapse of twenty years they 
would not look so much like old acquaintances who had 
kept their youth too well, one need certainly not be 
shy of them. Even if all the beauties were as bad as 
they were painted, there are many other women not 
ostensibly bad whose pictures fill Hampton Court; but, 
knowing what galleries are, how mortally fatiguing to 
every fibre, I should not think of making the reader 
follow me through the long rooms of the palace, and I 
will now own that I even spared myself many details in 
this second visit of mine. 

Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never 
ceases to be most intimately interesting down to the day 
of that third George who had his ears boxed there. The 
second James had almost as little to do with it as our last 
king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else 
that he had no time for the place where other sovereigns 
before and after him took their pleasure. But William 
and Mary seemed to give it most of their leisure ; to the 
great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if it were 
a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Ken- 
sington. His queen planted it and kept it to his fancy 
while he was away fighting the Stuarts in Ireland; and 
when she was dead, he continued to pull down and build 
up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the 
sort of ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the 
unsparing present always touches the past. He sick- 
ened towards his end there, and one day his horse 
stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in 
the park where the kings from Henry VIII. down had 
chased the deer), fell with him and hurt him past sur- 
gery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly after- 
wards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers 
at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed 

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so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat. 
They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's time, 
when under a dull sovereign the civility of England 
brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem 
of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite 
artificial flower which it ever bore ; for it was at Hamp- 
ton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the 
poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in 
the matchless numbers of The Rape of the Lock. 

Such pleasure - parties as that in which the lovely 
Arabella Fermor lost her curl under the scissors of Lord 
Petre, must have had the best of the gayety, in the time 
of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself, writing 
of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life 
as one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was 
fairest and brightest and wittiest, if not wisest in Eng- 
land graced it, and the names of Bellenden and Lepell 
and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and 
Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that 
must have been so heavy even at Hampton Court in 
these reigns. After all, it is the common people who 
get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house 
for which they have paid comes back to them, as palaces 
are not unapt finally to do; and it is not unimaginable 
that collectively they bring as much brilliancy and 
beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers 
did in their mutually hampered pleasures. 

Though the Georges began to divide the palace up 
into the apartments for the kind of permanent guests 
of the state who now inhabit them, it was not until 
well into the time of the late queen that the galleries 
and gardens were thrown open, without price or re- 
striction, to the public. Whose ver the instinct or in- 
spiration was, the graciousness of it may probably be 

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AN AFTERNOON AT HMIPTON COURT 

attributed to the mother-hearted sovereign whose good- 
ness gave English monarchy a new lease of life in the 
affections of her subjects, and raised loyalty to a part 
of their religion. I suppose that actual rags and dirt 
would not be admitted to Hampton Court, but I doubt 
if any misery short of them would be excluded. Our 
fellow-visitors were of all types, chiefly of the humbler 
English, and there were not many obvious aliens among 
them. With that passion and pride in their own which 
sends them holidaying over the island to every point 
of historic or legendary interest, and every scene famous 
for its beauty, they strayed about the grounds and gar- 
den-paths of Hampton Court and through the halls of 
state, and revered the couches and thrones of the dead 
kings and queens in their bed-chambers and council- 
chambers, and perused the pictures on the walls, and 
the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest they did not seem 
persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their en- 
joyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it, 
and possibly it was even greater without that. They 
could not have got so much hurt from the baleful beau- 
ties of Charles's court without their history as with it, 
and where they might not have been protected by their 
ignorance, they were saved by their preoccupation with 
one another, for they mostly hunted the objects of in- 
terest in courting couples. 

We were going, after we had shared their sight-seeing, 
to enjoy the special privilege of visiting one of the pri- 
vate apartments into which the palace has been so 
comfortably divided up. But here, I am sorry to say, 
I must close the door in the reader's face, and leave him 
to cool his heels (I regret the offensiveness of the ex- 
pression, but I cannot help it) on the threshold of the 
apartment, at the top of the historic staircase which 

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he will have climbed with us, until we come out again. 
I do not mind telling him that nothing could be more 
charmingly homelike, and less like the proud discomfort 
of a palace, than the series of rooms we saw. For a 
moment, also, I will allow him to come round into the 
little picturesque court, gay with the window-gardens 
of its quaint casements, where we can look down upon 
him from the leads of our apartment. He ought to 
feel like a figure in an uncommonly pretty water- 
color, for he certainly looks like one, under the clustering 
gables and the jutting lattices. But if he prefers com- 
ing to life as a sight-seer he may join us at the door of 
Cardinal Wolsey's great kitchen, now forming part of 
our hostess's domain. The vast hearth is there yet, with 
its crane and spit, and if the cardinal could come back 
he might have a dinner cooked at it for Edward VII. 
with very little more trouble than for Henry VIII. 
three or four hundred years ago. "But what in the 
world," the reader may ask me, putting his hand on an 
old sedan-chair, which is somewhere in the same base- 
ment, if not in the kitchen itself, "is this?" I answer 
him, quite easily: "Oh, that is the Push," and explain 
that though now mounted on wheels, instead of poles, 
the sedan-chair is still in actual use, and any lady- 
dweller in the apartments has the right of going to a 
dinner, or for what I know a "rout" in it, wherever it 
can be propelled within the precints of the palace. 

I suppose it is not taken out into the town, and I do 
not know that the ladies of the apartments ever visit 
there. In spite of this misgiving, Hampton remains 
one of the innumerable places in England where I should 
like to live always. Its streets follow the Thames, or 
come and go from the shores so pleasantly, that there 
is a sense of the river in it everywhere; and though I 

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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 

suppose people do not now resort to the place so much 
by water as they used, one is quite free to do so if one 
Hkes. We had not thought, however, to hire a water- 
man with his barge in coming, and so we poorly went 
back by the train. I say poorly in a comparative sense 
only, for there are many worse things in the world than 
running up to London in the cool, the very cool, of an 
April evening from Hampton Court. At such an hour 
you see the glad young suburban husbands, who have 
got home for the day, digging in the gardens at the backs 
of the pretty houses which your train passes, and the 
glad young wives, keeping round after them, and seeing 
they do not make play of their work. A neat maid in a 
cap pushes a garden-roller over the path, or a peram- 
bulator with a never-failing baby in it. The glimpse 
of domestic bliss is charming; and then it is such a com- 
fort to get back to London, which seems to have been 
waiting, like a great plain, kind metropolis-mother, to 
welcome you home again, and ask what you would rather 
have for dinner. 



XIV 
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 

THE invention of Week-Ends is a feat of the English 
social genius dating since long after my stay of 
twenty-odd years ago. Like so many other English 
mysteries it is very simple, and consists of dedicating 
the waste space of time between Friday afternoon and 
Monday forenoon to visits out of town. It is the time 
when, if you have friends within reasonable, or even 
unreasonable reach of London, you are asked down. 
Science has ascertained that in this interval of fifty or 
sixty hours no one can do anything, and that the time 
had better be frankly given up to pleasure. 

Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no 
such intervals between sights, or perhaps between en- 
gagements, and we found a whole week-end beyond our 
grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend it 
here or there in the country. That was why we were 
going down to the place of a friend one Sunday morning 
instead of a Friday evening and coming back the same 
day instead of the next. But we were glad of our piece 
of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grate- 
ful for the Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the 
most perfect of its kind. There used to be such Sun- 
days in America when people were young, and I suppose 
there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if 
you are no longer so very young you will be more apt 

150 



A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 

to find them in England, where Sunday has been study- 
ing, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in just 
what proportion to blend the blue and white in its wel- 
kin, and to unite warmth and coolness in its air. 

I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church 
that morning, but our third-class compartment was 
filled with people going into the country for the day; 
fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for an 
endless time in the fields and woods, which are often 
free in that much-owned England, while the may was 
yet freshly red and white on the hawthorns in the first 
week in June. Among our fellow - passengers that 
morning a young mother, not much older than her five 
children, sat with her youngest in her arms, while the 
other four perched at the edge of the seat, two on each 
side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare of red 
cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came 
to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had 
to help. One's heart must go with these holiday-makers 
as they began to leave the train after the last suburban 
stations, where they could feel themselves fairly in the 
country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such 
motherly looking country, and yet young with spring- 
time, and of a breath that came balmily in at the open 
car-windows; and the trees stood about in the meadows 
near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing 
it was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being 
much good for fuel or lumber they could stand for ages 
and ages, and shelter the sheep and cattle without 
danger of the axe. 

At our own station we found our host's motor waiting 
for us, and after waiting for some one else, who did not 
come by the next train, it whisked us much sooner than 
we could have wished over the nine miles of smooth road 

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stretching to his house. The Enghsh are always telUng 
you, if you are an American, how the Americans think 
nothing of distances, and they apparently derive their 
belief from the fact that it is a thousand miles from 
New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to 
San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we 
do not step casually aboard a train for either of those 
places, or, indeed, without much moral and material 
preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being 
shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware 
attaches to you from our supposed contempt of space, 
you could make out a very pretty case against them, in 
convicting them of an even greater indifference to dis- 
tances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and 
accepting invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a 
run from London down to Ultima Thule for a week is 
thought nothing of, or much less of than a journey from 
New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more 
in the English social scheme than the other is in ours; 
and perhaps the distance at which a gentleman will live 
from his railroad-station in the country is still more 
impressive. The American commuter who drives night 
and morning two or three miles after leaving and before 
getting his train, thinks he is having quite drive enough; 
if he drives six miles the late and early guest feels him- 
self badly used; but apparently such distances are not 
minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come 
to devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled 
away by a public fly, they seem not to have been re- 
garded as evils. 

For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. 
Every foot, every inch of the way was delightful, and 
we only wished that our motor could have conceived of 
our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom 

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 

had made it indifferent. There were some villages in 
the course of that swift flight where we could have 
willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with 
gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards 
and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for 
millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church- 
going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene, 
our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort 
of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves 
are the symbol of our race's rustic Sunday leisure every- 
where; and the main difference that I could note between 
our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they 
would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, 
and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very 
well sit on the tops of hedges. 

If one part of England can be said to be more charm- 
ing than another, and I suppose that there are odds in 
its loveliness, I think there can be no doubt but we were 
that day in one of the most beautiful regions within an 
hour's reach of London. We were pretty constantly 
mounting in our motor-flight from the station; the up- 
lands opened round us, and began to roll far away tow- 
ards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very 
stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency 
of English downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and 
this we had from the windows and gardened levels of 
our friends' house even more than from the highroad, 
which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way 
of its own. Mountains would have been out of key 
with the landscape; downs were just right. 

I do not know why the house was the more agreeable 
for being new, and for being the effect of our friends' 
immediate and not their ancestral fancy, quite as it 
would have been with most of our friends' country- 

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houses at home. We certainly had not come to England 
for newness of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the 
shrubberies being new; and my content was absolute 
when I heard from our friends that they had at one time 
thought of building their house of wood : the fact seemed 
to restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built 
continent which I had so willingly forsaken only a few 
weeks before. 

But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than 
that it shall render us some fleeting image of the nearest 
and dearest things of home ? What I had reasonably or 
logically come to England for was nature tamed to the 
hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of some- 
thing wild, something savage - looking, gaunt, huge, 
rugged, I rejoiced with an insensate pleasure in its like- 
ness to the roughest aspect of America that association 
could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but 
it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some 
others, and I will own that when our friends took us the 
walk over the downs which they had promised us, 
nothing could have gladdened me so much as to enter a 
secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart- 
track growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and 
finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths 
of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have 
been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering 
out of memory of the clearing where the young pines 
and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the 
giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out 
over its snows and mosses. 

The masses of the red may and the white may which 
stood here and there in the border of the yews, might 
have been the blossom of the wilding apple-trees which 
often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent 

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 

hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, 
but I could recall nothing that was quite American 
when once we had plunged into the shadow of these 
great yews, and I could not even find their like in the 
English literature which is the companion of American 
nature. I could think only of the weird tree - shapes 
which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so 
mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave 
Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as 
if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his 
illustrations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval 
moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame 
to bear what witness we can to the fact. 

The yew-tree's shade in Gray's Elegy had not pre- 
pared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never 
imagined them of the vastness I beheld. The place had 
its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations 
of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish 
flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less 
protected than now, or when its wood was more employed 
in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London 
used to come out to the forest by night and lop away 
great limbs of the yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of 
timber-merchants. From time to time my host put 
his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a 
tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry 
decay without that endeavor some other trees make to 
cover the stump with a new growth. The down, he 
told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his 
horse or his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not 
know whose forest rights, if any one's, were especially 
violated in these cruel midnight outrages on the yews; 
but some one must have had the interest to stop it. 

I would not try to say how far the common extended, 

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or how far its privileges; but the land about is mostly 
held in great estates, like most of the land in England, 
and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie 
the popular privileges. I fancied a sjnubol of these 
in the game keeper-whom we met coming out of the 
wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently 
sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheas- 
ants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his 
custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met 
in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now 
seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I 
would not for the sake of the books where I have known 
so many of his sort, have him the least different from 
what he was. 

The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is 
usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liber- 
ties. By the time we got back to lunch we could have 
believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had 
been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after 
the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, 
which we were to take at a famous house in the neigh- 
borhood, the temperature was all right again; it was 
more than all right in the cold current of air which the 
motor created. In the course of that post - luncheon 
talk our host brought out a small porcelain bust of Wash- 
ington, in very Continental blue, which he said was one 
of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the 
time of our Revolution to express the feeling of our Eng- 
lish sympathizers in the struggle which gave English 
liberty a new lease. One reads of this sympathy, how 
wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but 
till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not real- 
ized it. The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at 
our ignorance with his accustomed blandness, and I hope 

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A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 

he will never regret being given to one of us as a testi- 
mony of the amity which had largely endured for our 
nation from and through the most difficult times. The 
gift lent our day a unique grace, and I could only hope 
that it might be without a surprise too painful that our 
English Washington would look upon the American 
Republic of his creation when we got home with 
him; I doubted if he would find it altogether his 
ideal. 

The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down 
to the house where we were going, I do not know how 
many miles, for our afternoon tea. The house was 
famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in ex- 
istence; but I am not going to transfer the burden of 
my slight knowledge of its past to the mind of the 
reader. I will only say that it came into the hands of 
the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of 
its owners' heads, a means of acquisition not so dis- 
tasteful to him as to them, and after its restitution 
to the much decapitated family it continued in their 
possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a 
vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, 
rising upon a gentle level of fields and meadows, with 
nothing dramatically picturesque in the view from its 
straight-browed windows. The present owner, who 
showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in 
consideration of our early train, has the generous pas- 
sion of leaving the old place as nearly as he can in the 
keeping of its past; and I was glad to have him to agree 
with me that the Tudor period was that in which Eng- 
lish domestic comfort had been most effectually studied. 
But my satisfaction in this was much heightened by 
my approval of what he was simultaneously saying 
about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not pub- 
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LONDON FILMS 

lishing serial fiction : in his own newspaper, he said, he 
had a story running all the time. 

The old and the new kiss each other constantly 
in England, and I perceived that this vividly modern 
possessor of the most perfect Tudor house existing was, 
with the intense actuality of his interests and ambitions, 
as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. 
When we came out of the house and walked towards 
the group we had left under a spreading oak (or it might 
have been an elm; the two are much of the same habit 
in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have 
fancied one's self in any most picturesque period of the 
past, if it had not been for the informality of the men's 
dress. Women are always of the past in the beauty 
of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking 
across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their 
pretty gowns of our day, could easily have stepped out 
of an old picture, or continued in it as they sat in their 
wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table. 



XV 

FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT 

AN incident of the great midsummer heat, was an 
jLjL excursion down the Thames which took us far from 
the society atmosphere so relaxing to the moral fibre 
of the mere witness of the London season. The change 
was not to the cooler air which had been imagined, but 
it immersed us for the space of the boat's voyage to and 
from Greenwich among those social inferiors who are 
probably the moral betters of their superiors, but whose 
company does not always seem the spiritual baptism 
it doubtless is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly 
of the classes which are lower as well as middle, and the 
sole worldly advantage they had of us was that they 
were going where they wished, and we were going where 
we must. We had started for Richmond, but as there 
proved to be no boat for Richmond, we decided to take 
the boat which was for Greenwich, and consoled our- 
selves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor 
of many parliamentary and literary feasts which that 
fish has furnished. A whitebait dinner, what would not 
one suffer of human contiguity for it, even though it 
could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early 
hour? 

It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the 
Greenwich boat puffed up to her landing at Westminster 
Bridge, and the lower middle classes streamed aboard. 

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She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat, 
and she was of a failing line which the London County 
Council is about to replace by a line of municipal boats, 
without apparently alarming, in the English, the sen- 
sibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there 
is any talk of government transportation. The official 
who sold me tickets might have been training himself 
for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly 
explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my 
inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in 
American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. 
He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat 
struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which 
passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the 
tide towards Greenwich. 

Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark 
and the grandeur of the Westminster shore, which is 
probably the noblest water-front in the world. Near 
and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial 
masses of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we 
passed, varied their grouping with one another, and 
with the leafy domes and spires which everywhere 
enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great 
succession ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it 
does to the mind's eye, but to the body's eye, the Tower 
is rather histrionic than historic. It is like a scenic 
reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage; 
and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the 
County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to 
be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the 
Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the pur- 
chase: New York could easily build a London Tower 
that would look worthier of its memories than the real 
one, without even making it a sky-scraper. 

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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT 

So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it 
is so true as it is that after passing the Tower the one 
shore of the Thames begins to lose its dignity and beauty, 
and to be of hke effect with the other, which is the 
Southwark side, and hke all the American river-sides 
that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, 
and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the 
shipping in the stream does little to console. That is 
mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners, 
clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or 
shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the for- 
est of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River 
and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between 
low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of 
slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of 
the river brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom. 

Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bath- 
ing from the slimy shoals, running down to the water 
on planks laid over them, and splashing joyously into 
the filthy solution with the inextinguishable gladness 
of their years. They looked Hke boys out of the pur- 
lieus of Dickens's poverty-world, and all London water- 
side apparitions are more or less from his pages. The 
elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated hotel to which 
we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as 
much of his invention as if he had created him from the 
dust of the place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul 
into him. He had a queer pseudo-respectful shuffle 
and a sidelong approach, with a dawning baldness at 
the back of his head, which seemed of one quaUty with 
these characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with 
the greasiness of long serving. Asked for whitebait, he 
destroyed the illusion in which we had come at a blow. 
He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if 

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we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any 
call for it now, and they did not keep it. Then he 
smiled down upon us out of an apparently humorous 
face in which there was no real fun, and added that we 
could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon 
mayonnaise was therefore what we had, and except that 
it was not whitebait, it was not very disappointing; we 
had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, 
we were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a 
fly which we wished to take for a drive, in the absence 
of whitebait. But a fly required, in Greenwich, an 
interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, 
though we were assured it would be fairly conducted, 
we decided to forego, and contented ourselves with 
exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmos- 
phere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The 
room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite rea- 
son, and the room in which the ministry used to have 
their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before 
whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some 
state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms 
that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a 
full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate fore- 
ground — it was as much earth as water that lapped the 
shore — a small boy wading out to a small boat and pro- 
viding himself a sorrowful evening at home with his 
mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves and trousers in 
the solution. Some young men in rowing costume 
were vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of 
filling in their outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaint- 
ance we had made in coming, was hurrying to get out of 
the river into the freshness of the sea, and this was all 
of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to 
see. 

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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT 

But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of 
balls and parties, which, though not imaginably of the 
first social quality, must have given his middle-aging 
hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in summer. 
He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the 
gallery of the old naval college on the way back to our 
boat, and saw us to the door, and fairly out into the 
blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat, and we utilized 
every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, ruiming from 
tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every 
available portico and colonnade. But once inside the 
great hall where England honors her naval heroes and 
their battles, it was deliciously cool. It could not have 
been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid 
air, for they all represented the heat of battle, with 
fire and smoke, and the work of coming to close quarters, 
with 

"hot gun-lip kissing gun." 

The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals 
and other sea-dogs of England whose portraits relieved 
the intolerable spread of the battle scenes; and it was 
best of all in the many pictures and effigies and relics 
of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of 
his great time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; 
everywhere his face showed the impassioned dreamer, 
the poet; and once more gave the lie to the silly notion 
that there is a type of this or that kind of great men. 
When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we 
perceived that the whole place we were in was a temple 
to Nelson, and that whatever minor marine deities had 
their shrines there, it was in strict subordination to him. 
England had done what she could for them, who had 
done so much for her; but they seem consecrated in 

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rather an out-of-the-way place, now that there is no 
longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their worship ; 
and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before 
choosing just their apotheosis. 

By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, 
it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped 
from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the 
first-class shelter of the awning at her stern. Even 
there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the 
small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solu- 
tion; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves 
to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide 
among the lower middle classes. They were mostly 
good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment harsher 
than pity even when they were not good. Still it was 
not just the sort of day when one could have wished 
them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. 
Perhaps they were only incidentally given it, but it 
must have been from a specific generosity that several 
children in arms were fed by their indulgent mothers 
with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had prob- 
ably had no whitebait. 



XVI 

HENLEY DAY 

OUR invitation to the regatta at Henley, included 
luncheon in the tent of an Oxford college, and a 
view of the races from the college barge, which, with 
the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed 
down the Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry 
between the crews of the two great English universities. 
There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited 
through the air in default of water for towing them to 
Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of house- 
boats stretching up and down the grassy margin of the 
stream, along the course the rowers were to take. As 
their contest was the least important fact of the occa- 
sion for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a 
clear notion which came off winner in any of the events, 
I will try not to trouble the reader with my impressions 
of them, except as they lent a vivid action and formed 
a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles 
under the sun. I have hitherto contended that class- 
day at Harvard was the fairest flower of civilization, 
but, having seen the regatta at Henley, I am no longer 
so sure of it. 

Henley is no great way from London, and the quick 
pulse of its excitement could be sensibly felt at the 
station, where we took train for it. Our train was one 
of many special trains leaving at quarter-hourly inter- 

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vals, and there was already an anxious crowd hurrying 
to it, with tickets entithng them to go by that train 
and no other. It was by no means the youthful crowd 
it would have been at home, and not even the over- 
whelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now 
politely prevails with us in almost her European num- 
bers, was here in no greater evident force; but gray- 
haired fathers and uncles and elderly friends much 
more abounded; and they looked as if they were not 
altogether bent upon a vicarious day's pleasure. The 
male of the English race is of much more striking pres- 
ence than the American; he keeps more of the native 
priority of his sex in his costume, so that in this crowd, 
I should say, the outward shows were rather on his 
part than that of his demurely cloaked females, though 
the hats into which these flowered at top gave some hint 
of the summer loveliness of dress to be later revealed. 
They were, much more largely than most railway-sta- 
tion crowds, of the rank which goes first class, and in 
these special Henley trains it was well to have booked 
so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive uncrumpled, 
for the second-class and third-class carriages were packed 
with people. 

There seemed so many of our fellow-passengers, that 
reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge 
of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste 
to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside the 
station which were to take us to the scene of the races. 
Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these 
vehicles, or for the more public brakes and char-a-bancs 
and omnibuses plying to the same destination; and so 
far from falling victims to covert extortion in the matter 
of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded 
with the price of the drive. This was about double the 

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HENLEY DAY 

ordinary price, and so soon does human nature adjust 
itself to conditions that I promptly complained to an 
English friend for having had to pay four shillings for a 
drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home. 
In my resentment I tried to part foes with my driver, 
who mildly urged that he had but a few days in the 
year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded so ill that 
when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day, 
I amicably took him again for the return to the station. 

Of the coming and going through the town of Henley 
I keep the sort of impression which small English towns 
give the passing stranger, of a sufficiently busy commer- 
cial life, doing business in excellent shops of the modern 
pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a familiar 
picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned 
annual or stage - setting or illustrated Christmas - story 
they are out of. I never could pass through such a 
town without longing to stop in it and know all about 
it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated 
my longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could 
have had each other to ourselves in the interest of an 
intimate acquaintance. It looked most worthy to be 
known, and I have no doubt that it is full of history 
and tradition of the sort which small towns have been 
growing for centuries throughout England. 

But we had only that one day there, and in our haste 
to give it to the regatta we could only make sure of 
driving over a beautiful picture-postal bridge on our 
way to the meadows by whose brink our college barge 
was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain. 
It was really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar 
with boat-racing in the Thames where the Thames is 
still the Isis at Oxford, and was as wholly without the 
motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many 

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other barges and house-boats set broadside to the shore 
for a mile up and down as closely as they could be lined, 
it was of a comfortable cabin below and of a pleasant 
gallery above, with an awning to keep off the sun or 
rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather 
to send. But that day the weather had no whims; it 
was its pleasure to be neither wet nor hot, but of a de- 
licious average warmth, informed with a cool freshness 
which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact, 
youth came back in all the holiday sights and scents to 
the elderly witness who ought to have known better 
than to be glad of such things as the white tents in the 
green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the sun- 
light by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages 
thronging up and down the road, or standing detached 
from the horses in the wayside shadow, where the 
trodden grass, not less nor more than the wandering 
cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus- 
days and Fourths of July. But such things lift the 
heart in spite of philosophy and experience, and bid it 
rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene every- 
where elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncra- 
sies of time and place. Certain of these might well 
touch the American half-brother with a sense of differ- 
ence, but there was none that perhaps more suggested 
it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board 
that these or those grounds in the meadows were this 
or that lady's, who might be supposed waiting in pro- 
prietory state for her guests within the pavilion of her 
roped-off enclosure. Together with this assertion of 
private right, and the warning it implied, was the ex- 
pression of yet elder privilege in the presence of the 
immemorial wanderers who had their shabby camps 
by the open wayside and offered the passer fortune at 

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HENLEY DAY 

so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford 
to buy a prophecy of prosperity from them; I do not 
know why they proposed to sell with these favorable 
destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make. 

These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can nat- 
uralize, are a fact of every English holiday without 
which it would not be so native, as the English them- 
selves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and in- 
tensely insular through the prevalence of more and 
more Americans among them. Most of our fellow- 
guests on that Oxford barge were our fellow-country- 
men, and I think now that without their difference 
there would have been wanting an ult mately pene- 
trating sense of the entirely English keeping of the affair. 
The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I hope, a novel zest 
to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to 
offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed 
to grow and open flower-like from the water, until it was 
a blossom which covered the surface with its petals. 

The course for the races was marked off midway from 
either shore by long timbers fastened end to end and 
forming a complete barrier to the intrusion of any of 
the mere pleasure-craft. Our own shore was sacred 
to barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I re- 
member rightly, was devoted to the noisy and muscular 
expansion of undergraduate emotion, but, it seems to 
me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it 
were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own 
side. Still the impression of something rather more 
official in the arrangements of that shore persists with 
me. 

There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing 
began, but as this throughout was the least interest of 
the affair for any one but the undergraduates, and the 

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nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I will keep my 
promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced 
some minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather un- 
impressive hand-bell. Then a pistol-shot was fired; 
and then, after the start far up the course, the shells 
came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed 
that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked 
from their waists up as our university crews do, or used 
to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at 
New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows 
slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculptu- 
resque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for 
the signal to come to eager life. I think that American 
moment was more thrilling than any given moment 
at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a col- 
lege barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored 
spectator, I am not going to own that it equals as a 
view-point the observation-train, with its successive 
banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of 
handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast 
of the racing crew^s beside the stately course of the 
Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I think it best to 
withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should 
decide in favor of Henley. 

There was already a multitude of small boats within 
the barriers keeping the race-course open, and now and 
then one of these crossed from shore to shore. They 
were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and 
snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply 
rounded craft, new to my American observance, and 
called cockles, very precisely adapted to contain one 
girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed on the 
young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or 
that should overset the ticklishly balanced shell. She 

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HENLEY DAY 

might assist her eyes in trimming the boat with a red or 
yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her 
gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must 
be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, 
lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for 
the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution 
seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that 
while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were 
afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleido- 
scope's vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As 
the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was 
more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park 
had taken water, and though in such a scene as that 
which spread its soft allure before us, it was not quite 
imaginable that all the loveliness one saw was of the 
quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near Stan- 
hope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the 
beauty was not as well - born as it was well - dressed. 
Those house-boats up and down the shore must mainly 
have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and of 
those who had come from the four quarters to Henley 
for the day, not every one could have been an actress 
with her friends, though each contributed to the effect 
of a spectacle not yet approached in any pantomime. 
There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and 
forth among the house-boat people ; and I was told that 
it was even more than correct for a young man to ask a 
house-boat girl to go out with him in one of the small 
boats on the water, but how much this contributed to 
keep the scene elect I do not know. 

If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality 
as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a 
visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of 
bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This 

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ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept 
one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's 
college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the 
eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time, 
and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a 
pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected 
pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or 
playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For, 
it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic 
crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and 
this gave the affair its pathos. Not that negro min- 
strelsy as the English have interpreted the sole Amer- 
ican contribution to histrionic art, is in itself pathetic, 
except as it is so lamentably far from the original; but 
that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is 
sorrowful; and there were many different artists there 
who were working hard. Sometimes it was the man 
who sang and the woman who played; but it was always 
the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to 
have the greater enterprise and perseverance. Of course 
in the case of the blackened minstrels, some man ap- 
pealed to the love of humor rather than the love of 
beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case 
of an old-time plantation darkey who sang the familiar 
melodies with ^ the slurring vowels and wandering as- 
pirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half 
blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more 
effective than the other could have been. A com- 
pany of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, 
which one played while another led the singing in an 
amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting 
their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager be- 
cause they were, as our English friends believed, under- 
graduates on a lark. 

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HENLEY DAY 

They were no better-natured than the rest of the 
constantly increasing multitude. The boats thickened 
upon the water as if they had risen softly from the bot- 
tom to which any panic might have sent them; but the 
people in them took every chance with the amiability 
which seems to be finally the thing that holds England 
together. The English have got a bad name abroad 
which certainly they do not deserve at home; but per- 
haps they do not think foreigners worthy the considera- 
tion they show one another on any occasion that masses 
them. One lady, from her vantage in the stern of her 
boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a tremen- 
dous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked 
round and smiled, as if it had been a caress, which it 
probably was, in disguise. But they were all kind and 
patient with one another whether in the same boat or 
not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a 
boat should be managed; they bumped and punched 
one another wildly; but the occupants of the boat 
assailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a 
smiling acceptance of its apology, and passed on the 
incident to another boat before or beside them. From 
the whole multitude there came not one loud or angry 
note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene 
it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the 
universal good-humor. The women were there to show 
themselves in and at their prettiest, and to see one 
another as they lounged on the cushions or lay in the 
bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their 
hats and parasols; the men were there to make the 
women have a good time. Neither the one nor the 
other seemed in the least concerned in the races, which 
duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and 
firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal 

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came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure- 
craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, soft- 
ly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the 
water, so that you could have walked from the barrier 
to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have 
suggested that the situation might have had its perils. 
Any panic must have caused a commotion that would 
have overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged 
their freight to helpless death. But the spectacle smiled 
securely to the sun, which smiled back upon it from a 
cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than English 
ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our lunch- 
eon in the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the grassy 
shore. 

To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long 
tables, and served one another from the dishes put 
before us. There was not the ambitious variety of 
salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have 
seen at Harvard Class-Day spreads, but there were the 
things that stay one more wholesomely and substan- 
tially, and one was not obliged to eat standing and 
hold one's plate. Everything in England that can be 
is adjusted to the private and personal scale; everything 
with us is generalized and fitted to the convenience of the 
greatest number. Later, we all sat down together at 
afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as 
breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits. 

I believe some races were rowed while we were eating 
and drinking, but we did not mind. We were not there 
for the races, but for the people who were there for the 
races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time, 
the multitude of them seemed to have increased, and 
where I had fancied that not one boat more could have 
been pressed in, half a dozen had found room. The 

174 



HENLEY DAY 

feat must have been accomplished by main strength 
and awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place 
indeed for skill to evince itself; but people pushed about 
in the most incredible way when they tried to move, 
though mostly they did not try; they let their boats lie 
still, and sway with the common movement when the 
water rose and sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them. 
There were more and more people of the sort that there 
can never be enough of, such as young girls beautifully 
dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not 
hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer 
hats. It was the fairy multitude of Harvard Class-Day 
in English terms, and though Henley never came at 
any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expres- 
sion which Class-Day used to reach when all its youthful 
loveliness banked itself on the pine-plank gradines en- 
closing the Class-Day elm, and waited the struggle for 
its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in the 
presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves 
from a society ultimately, if not immediately, vaster. 
It was rather dreadful perhaps to reflect that if all that 
brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had been en- 
gulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly 
replaced by as much more, not once but a score of 
times. 

I will not pretend that this thought finally drove me 
from the scene, for I am of a very hardy make when it 
comes to the most frightful sort of suppositions. But 
the afternoon was wearing away, and we must go some- 
time. It seemed better also to leave the gayety at its 
height: the river covered with soft colors, and the 
barges and house-boats by the brink, with their com- 
panies responsive in harmonies of muslin and gauze 
and lace to those afloat; the crowds on the opposite 

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LONDON FILMS 

shore in constant movement, and in vivid agitation 
when the bell and the pistol announced a racing event. 
We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our 
way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass, 
weaving the web of fate and selling brooms and brushes 
in the intervals of their mystical employ, or cosily gos- 
siping together; and then we took for the station the 
harmless fly which we had forever renounced as preda- 
tory in the morning. 

It was not yet the rush-hour for the run back to Lon- 
don, and we easily got an empty compartment, in which 
we were presently joined by a group of extremely hand- 
some people, all of a southern type, but differing in age 
and sex. There were a mother and a daughter, and a 
father evidently soon to become a father-in-law, and 
the young man who was to make him so. The women 
were alike in their white gowns, and alike in their dark 
beauty, but the charms of the mother had expanded in 
a bulk incredible of the slender daughter. She and her 
father were rather silent, and the talk was mainly be- 
tween the mother and the future of the girl. They first 
counted up the day's expenses, and the cost of each dish 
they had had at luncheon. " Then there was the cham- 
pagne," the lady insisted. "It isn't so much when you 
count that out; and you know we chose to have it." 
They all discussed the sum, and agreed that if they 
had not wanted the champagne their holiday would 
not have cost inordinately. "And now," the mother 
continued to the young man, " you must order that box 
for the opera as soon as ever you reach the hotel. Order 
it by telephone. Give the girl your boutonniere; that 
will jolly her. Get a four-guinea box opposite the royal 
box." 

As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class 

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HENLEY DAY 

seat, her little feet could not reach the floor, and the 
effort with which she bent forward was heroic. The 
very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was almost 
ecUpsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gen- 
tleman in the opposite corner spoke a word now and 
then, but for the most part silently smelled of tobacco. 
The talk which the mother and future son-in-law had 
to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own 
affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do 
not know Vv^hy they should have wished to crush us 
with their opulence since they would not have chosen 
to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of 
opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly hand- 
some people, in the dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which 
I am afraid our own race can never achieve. Yet with 
all this evident opulence, with their resolute spirits, with 
their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon 
which they could have made less expensive if they had 
not chosen to gratify themselves in it, with their pros- 
pect of a four-guinea box, opposite the box of royalty, 
at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic 
than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never 
imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they 
were a radiantly enviable party returning from a brilliant 
day at Henley. 



XVII 

AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

THE return in mid-September to the London which 
we left at the end of July, implicates a dramatic 
effect more striking than any possible in the mere tour- 
ist's experience. In the difference between this London 
and that you fully realize the moral and physical magni- 
tude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to 
bursting with the tide of manifold life ; the later London 
lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere 
sense of what it has been through. The change is 
almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be 
witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a 
city which still holds all its six millions except a few 
hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a cer- 
tain part of London has in September, for the brilliant 
and perpetual movement of those hundred thousands 
was what gave it repletion. 

The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Picca- 
dilly and the streets of shops is all away at country- 
houses or at the sea-side or in the mountains of the 
island or the continent. The comely young giants 
who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the 
paths of the Park are off killing grouse ; scarcely a livery 
shows itself; even the omnibus -tops are depopulated; 
long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks; the stately pro- 
cession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts at 

178 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the 
tormented regiments of soldiers are at peace in their 
barracks; a strange quiet has fallen on that better quarter 
of the town which is really, or unreally, the town. With 
this there is an increase of the homelike feeling which is 
always present, with at least the happy alien, in London; 
and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and cen- 
tralized in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the 
theatres. There, indeed, the season seems to have 
returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses and the 
stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of 
its summer joy. 

One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I 
met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and 
the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the 
church parade wore in life through those halcyon days 
when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition 
put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but 
upon the whole it failed. It may have been an im- 
pulse from this vision that carried me as far as 
Hyde Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick 
or the dead, in the chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning 
up the edges of the road. In the consecrated closes, 
where the vanished children of smartness used to stand 
or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walk- 
ing, the inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered, 
with their legs in the air, on the wet grass, and the drip- 
ping leaves smote damply together overhead. Another 
close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I 
saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had 
showered over-night, and the ground must still have been 
wet where a score of the bodies of the unemployed, or at 
least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun. They 
were having their holiday, but they did not make me 

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LONDON FILMS 

feel as if I were still enjoying my outing so much as 
some other things: for instance, the colored minstrelsy, 
which I had heard so often at the sea-side in August, and 
which reported itself one night in the Mayfair street 
which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and 
touched our hearts with the concord of our native airs 
and banjos. We were sure they were American darkies, 
from their voices and accents, but perhaps they were not 
as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who 
came down the place at high noon with her large baby 
in her arms, swaying it from side to side as she sang a 
plaintive ballad to the skies, and scanned the windows 
for some relenting to her want. 

The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the 
season had used so hard, were many of them putting 
themselves in repair against the next time of festivity, 
and testifying to the absence of their world. One day 
I found the solitude rather more than I could bear with- 
out appeal to that vastly more multitudinous world of 
the six millions who never leave London except on busi- 
ness. I said in my heart that this was the hour to go and 
look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in 
wait for me in St. Paul's, and I had no sooner mounted 
an omnibus-top for the journey through Piccadilly, the 
Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found the other omni- 
bus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. 
To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had 
formed the almost universal head-covering of the 'bus- 
top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but 
they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us 
when September begins. They had never so much rea- 
son to be here as with us, and they might have had al- 
most as much reason for lingering as they had for com- 
ing. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as 

180 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

well as among the omnibus- toppers, and the pedestrians 
abashed me by their undiminished myriads. As they 
streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent of eager life, 
and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels 
as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my 
theory of a decimated London. It was not the tenth 
man who was gone, nor the hundredth, if even it was 
the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis mocked 
with its millions the notion of nobody left in town be- 
cause a few pleasurers had gone to the moors or the 
mountains or the shores. 

Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle 
of September, the trivial kodak could not bear to dwell 
on the mortuary aspects which the fashionable quarters 
of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance 
of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek 
those springs or sources of the American nation which 
may be traced all over England, and which rather abound 
in London, trusting chances for the involuntary glimpses 
which are so much better than any others, when you 
can get them. In different terms, and leaving apart the 
strained figure which I cannot ask the reader to help me 
carry farther, I went one breezy, cool, sunny, and rainy 
morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps, 
and philosophize my reflections in the researches before 
us. Our rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows 
Barking, conveniently founded just opposite the Mark 
Lane District Railway Station, some seven or eight hun- 
dred years before I arrived there, and successively de- 
stroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair 
that I could safely lean against it while waiting for my 
friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood. 
The street before it might have been a second-rate 
New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, ex- 

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LOiNDON FILMS 

cept for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted 
yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public- 
houses. There was a continual coming and going of 
trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of 
hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all 
heedless, if not unconscious, of the Tower of London 
close at hand, whose dead were so often brought from 
the scaffold to be buried in that church. 

Our own mission was to revere its interior because 
William Penn was baptized in it, but when we had got 
inside we found it so full of scaffolding and the litter of 
masonry, and the cool fresh smell of mortar from the res- 
torations going on that we had no room for the emotions 
we had come prepared with. With the compassion of a 
kindly man in a plasterer's spattered suit of white, we 
did what we could, but it was very little. I at least was 
not yet armed with the facts that, among others, the head- 
less form of Archbishop Laud had been carried from the 
block on Tower Hill and laid in All Hallows; and if I 
had known it, I must have felt that though Laud could 
be related to our beginnings through his persecution 
of the Puritans, whom he harried into exile, his interment 
in All Hallows was only of remote American interest. 
Besides, we had set out with the intention of keeping 
to the origins of colonies which had not been so much 
studied as those of New England, and we had first 
chosen Penn as sufficiently removed from the forbidden 
ground. But we had no sooner left the church where 
he was baptized, to follow him in the much later interest 
of his imprisonment in the Tower, than we found our- 
selves in New England territory again. For there, 
round the first corner, under the foliage of the trees and 
shrubs that I had been ignorantly watching from the 
church, as they stiffly stirred in the September wind, 

182 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

was that Calvary of so many martyr - souls, Tower 
Hill. 

It is no longer, if it ever was, a hill, or even a per- 
ceptible rise of ground, but a pleasant gardened and 
planted space, not distinguishable from a hundred 
others in London, with public offices related to the 
navy closing it mostly in, but not without unofficial 
public and private houses on some sides. It was per- 
haps because of its convenience for his professional 
affairs that Admiral Penn had fixed such land-going 
residence as an admiral may have, in All Hallows Bark- 
ing parish, where his great son was born. "Your late 
honored father," his friend Gibson wrote the founder of 
Pennsylvania, "dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the 
east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall." 
But the memories of honored father and more honored 
son must yield in that air to such tragic fames as those 
of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these and 
the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir 
Harry Vane, once governor of Massachusetts, who died 
here among those whom the perjured second Charles 
played false when he came back to the throne of the 
perjured first Charles. In fact you can get away from 
New England no more in London than in America; and 
if in the Tower itself the long captivity of Sir Walter 
Raleigh somewhat dressed the balance, we were close 
upon other associations which outweighed the discovery 
of the middle south and of tobacco, a thousandfold. 

Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the 
common level than it once was, as often happens with 
rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinc- 
tion of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the 
general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not 
now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away, 

^3 183 



LONDON FILMS 

Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approach- 
ed, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories 
which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower 
towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical 
river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic 
modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the 
bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, 
and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we 
had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look 
as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the 
stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between 
Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the 
fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and 
their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking 
for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. 
Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said 
so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt. 
This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water 
was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting 
in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with 
various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced 
in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving. 
It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the 
present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny 
were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land 
they were to ennoble with the first great republican 
experiment of our race, after the commonwealth failed 
to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because of a 
want of imagination in both people and protector, who 
could not conceive of a state without an hereditary 
ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father, 
till another son of another father came back to urge 
his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a 
right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the 

184 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time 
and place ; but we ourselves who grew up were there had 
never been kings to craze the popular fanc}^, could not 
conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years 
and more, and even then some of us thought of having 
one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now 
had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last 
read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of 
American beginnings was made when Cromwell was 
forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom- 
house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice 
now on the site of whatever building then stood there, 
and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, 
whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I 
did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did, last. 
We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower 
Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once 
a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its 
inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled 
away to cool themselves in different parts of the Amer- 
ican wilderness. It was much later that the place 
became famous for the declaration of the three tailors 
of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have 
begun, a public appeal with the words : " We, the people 
of England," and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street 
is more suggestive of them than of those who went into 
exile for their religious and political faith. In the 
former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and 
poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly 
gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and common- 
place thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly 
mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, 
and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of 
plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street, 

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LONDON FILMS 

and who so largely form the ancestry of the American 
people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there 
is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should 
be glad to think characteristic of our nation in one of 
the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted Amer- 
ican bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better 
homes than the London poor could otherwise have 
known. 

Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom 
Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of free- 
dom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and 
for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the 
viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, 
under which we walked the length of the long, dull, 
noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church of 
St. Olave, or Glaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose 
name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, 
for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that 
sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth 
colony came from. The church is an uninteresting 
structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better 
with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers 
who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their 
silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the 
boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly 
believed that some part of the Clink was still to be de- 
tected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and 
we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave's 
or St. Tooley's, and wandered on through their shades, 
among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and 
damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those 
dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know 
whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the 
place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain 

186 



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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

floury laborers who had cleared a space among the 
wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were 
pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events 
of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, 
of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for 
if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the 
home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy 
quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its 
past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have 
to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres 
as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and, 
above all, the Globe. 

Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively 
blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and 
blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a 
hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the 
sympathetic American in England. It is really easier 
to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large 
air where the objects of your interest are placed at 
ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where 
you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, 
and perhaps treading down and pushing back others 
of equal import which you had not in mind. Eng- 
land has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, 
and her visionary children press so thick about her 
knees, that you cannot well single one specially out 
when you come close; it is only at a distance that you 
can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and 
study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman 
who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than 
halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of 
her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you 
wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside 
was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place 

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LONDON FILMS 

and extending his vast shadow over the region we had 
so troublesomely passed through, but now another em- 
barrassment of riches attended us. We were going to 
visit St. Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the 
son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long 
before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at 
Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have 
dreamed of naming after him another college in another 
Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through 
the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits 
and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, 
what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond 
Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud 
with coming and going at some railway station. Here 
we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, 
and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour's. Out- 
side it has been pitilessly restored in a later English 
version of the Early English in which it was built, and 
it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such 
feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within 
much of the original architectural beauty lingers, es- 
pecially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not 
there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's 
sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church 
than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer 
fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Ed- 
mund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger 
brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont 
and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again 
the poet John Gower, the "moral Gower" who so in- 
sufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and 
Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a 
painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so 
many actors buried in it that the church is full of the 

188 




Copi/rig/it, 19UJ, Iw Atvin Lunt/don Coburn 

LONDON BRIDGE 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little 
Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the 
outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more 
welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. 
Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John 
Harvard in St. Saviour's, and we were almost a year 
too early for the painted window which now commem- 
orates him. 

One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, 
for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a 
quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London 
seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed 
through, and I dare say they were not the best, the 
broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain 
against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground 
and fall from the clouds. But many people live there, 
and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of 
clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it 
was one o'clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting 
by the early closing which shuts the stores of London 
so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our 
way through them to the parapet for a final look at that 
stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly 
as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a 
kingdom.* 

* While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the 
problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the 
knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these 
researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed 
myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, 
which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which 
unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near 
six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any 
fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific 
erudition of mv friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, 
who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my state- 

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LONDON FILMS 

We were going from St. Saviour's in Southwark where 
Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city 
where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's effigy Hes in the 
chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our his- 
tory through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter 
Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wanton- 
ness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous 
reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at 
the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we 
did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of 
the most admirable cats in London. One curled herself 
round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was 
formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; 
another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses 
the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young 
sycamores flicker over her velvet flank; the third arched 
a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accom- 
panying us into the church. There was not much for us 
to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing 
that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire, 
and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly 
fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in 
the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus 
and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much 
because he had directed the publication of the first 
complete version of the English Bible, as because he 
had borne the name of a chief character in The Blithedale 
Romance. I am afraid that if the cat could have sup- 
posed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it 
would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I 
should not have known how to justify myself by ex- 

ments. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur 
to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they 
prove mistaken. 

190 




THE ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MAGNUS 
(From an old print) 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

plaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illus- 
triously connected with America through that coinci- 
dence than many more historical scenes. 

The early closing had already prevailed so largely in 
the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we 
were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree's 
at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for 
getting into any church, but we looked about us too 
carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who 
was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law 
of Virginia. That was what we said to console our- 
selves afterwards; but now, since we were, however un- 
wittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind 
the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan 
descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with 
ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that 
his part in them was alleged against him, and did some- 
thing to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is 
said to have helped in designing the church, and that 
the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and 
would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arun- 
del could have found his bones to put it over, are suffi- 
ciently irrelevant details. 

The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with 
him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street, 
down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of 
Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred 
there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses 
as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after pay- 
ing this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately 
bulk of India House, and think of the former occupying 
the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in 
compensation for coming so late to his work there. It 
was still better when, by an accident happier than that 

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which befell us at St. Catherine Cree's, we unexpectedly 
entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the 
church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New- 
Yorker's interest from the picturesque fact that Henry 
Hudson and his ship's company made their communion 
in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to 
the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help 
the Dutch found the Tammany regime, which still 
flourishes at the Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive 
Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not 
know why my genealogist should have had the mis- 
giving which he expressed within the overhearing of 
the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set 
him right. " Oh, 'e did mike it 'ere, sir. They've been 
and searched the records," she said, so that the reader 
now has it on the best authority. 

I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assur- 
ance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces 
of Early English architecture, and its look of being 
chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the 
heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener 
mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which 
pervade all old churches. But these things are of the 
nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be 
intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. 
Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, 
that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or clos- 
ing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their foot- 
ways and wheeiways, so that we got from point to point 
in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other 
associations that rivalled those w^e had more specifically 
in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, 
literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms 
that started up from the stones and the blocks of the 

192 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every 
step. As I have already tried to express, it is always 
the same story. London is too full of interest, and 
when I thought how I could have gone over as much 
ground in New York without anything to distract me 
from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those 
thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing 
but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, 
as I hurried with my friend through air that any igno- 
rance less dense would have found impassable with 
memories. 

As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only 
when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate 
Street to the sequestered place before the church of the 
Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and 
the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the 
Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dis- 
solved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to 
the "Germans" as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish 
diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beginnings 
of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was 
first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and 
who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it. 
Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the 
more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch, 
renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways, 
notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters 
and parcels would be received there for them; this some- 
how intimated that the refugees could not have found 
it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half 
round the world. Cunningham says that "the church 
contains some very good decorated windows, and will 
repay examination," but, like the early - closing shops 
all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday 

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LONDON FILMS 

afternoon, and we had to come away contenting our- 
selves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too 
freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impar- 
tially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker 
travellers, but they will readily find the church in the 
rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts 
there, and judge for themselves. 

Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to 
follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bow- 
bells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and 
through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the sev- 
eral prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it with- 
out making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and 
his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were 
forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to 
jail in spite of the jury's verdict of acquittal; such 
things could then be easily done. In self- justification 
they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that 
made a very perfect case for their worships, as the 
reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth 
in Maria Webb's story of The Penns and the Penningtons. 
As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh con- 
verted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote 
to him in Newgate: "Son William, if you and your 
friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your 
plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests 
to the end of the world. . . . Live in love. Shun all 
manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He 
will bless you." 

Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned 
is left; a spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of 
building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monu- 
ment to him who was brave in such a different way from 
his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly 

194 



i 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, com-tly 
son would achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was 
cast there the second time in three months, that he 
wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, and three 
minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a 
letter to Parliament explaining the principles of Quaker- 
i -.1 ..nd he protested to the sheriff of London against 
lie cruelties practised by the jailors of Newgate on 
prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich 
and well-born preferred to suffer with these humble 
victims; and probably his oppressors were as glad to be 
rid of him in the end as he of them. 

One may follow Penn (though we did not always fol- 
low him to all, that Saturday afternoon), to many other 
places in London: to the Tower, where he was impris- 
oned on the droll charge of " blasphemy,^' within stone's 
throw of All Hallow's Barking, where he was christened; 
to Grace Church Street, where he was arrested for preach- 
ing; to Lincoln's Inn, where he had chambers in. his 
worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to 
school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the 
"rules" of the prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt 
awhile almost in hiding from the creditors who were 
pressing him, probably for the public debt of Pennsyl- 
vania. 

We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited 
the church of St. Sepulchre hard by, and vainly at- 
tempted to enter, because Roger Williams was christ- 
ened there, and so connected it with the coming of tol- 
eration into the world, as well as with the history of the 
minute province of Rhode Island, which his spirit so 
boundlessly enlarged. We failed equally of any satis- 
factory effect from Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, 
possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred 

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and five years before, and because my friend could not 
quite make out which neighboring street it was where the 
mother of the Wesley s was born. But we did what 
we could with the shield of the United States Consulate- 
General in the Place, and in an adjoining court we had 
occasion for seriousness in the capers of a tipsy French- 
man, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and 
was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently 
vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not 
insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that 
life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the 
antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no 
true photographer. 

After all, we did not find just the street, much less 
the house, in which Susannah Annesley had lived before 
she was Mrs. Wesley, and long before her sons had 
imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had 
borne its message to General Oglethorpe's new colony 
of Georgia. She lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury 
Square, that place sacred to so many varying mem- 
ories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased it, 
because they would not have the service from the book 
of Common Prayer read over them. There her dust 
mingles with that of John Bunyan, of Daniel de Foe, 
of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard, 
and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others. 
The English crowd one another no less under than 
above the ground, and their island is as historically as 
actually over-populated. As I have expressed before, 
you can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a 
certain association without being importuned by a 
score of others as interesting or more so. I have, for 
instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor of 
Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who 

196 




By courtesy of London Stereoscopic and Photograph Comj'any 

BOW-BELLS (ST. MARY-LE-BOW, CHEAPSIDE) 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

was silenced for his Puritanism in his church of St. 
Giles Cripplegate, because I should have to confess that 
when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from 
the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley, 
and John Wesley, and the Georgian Methodists to the 
far mightier fame of Milton, who hes interred there, 
with his father before him, with John Fox, author of 
The Book of Martyrs, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who 
sailed the western seas when they were yet mysteries, 
with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of Shakespeare's Sir 
Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a 
youth of twenty-one, to EUzabeth Bowchier. Again, 
I have had to ask myself, what is the use of pamfully 
following up the slender threads afterwards woven into 
the web of American nationaUty, when at any moment 
the clews may drop from your heedless hands in your 
wonder at some which are the woof of the history of the 
world? I have to own even here that the more storied 
dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay 
among them Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of In- 
crease and Cotton. 

That is a place which one must wish to visit not once, 
but often, and I hope that if I send any reader of mine 
to it he will fare better than we did, and not find it shut 
to the public on a Sunday morning when it ought to 
have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of 
England are quite past the comprehension of even such 
semi-aliens as the Americans, and must baffle entire 
foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen the 
Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane, 
which are licit, if not legal, and that Sunday morning 
before we found Bunhill Fields fast closed, we had found 
a market for poor Christians wide open in Whitecross 
Street near by. It was one of several markets of the 

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kind which begin early Saturday evening, and are 
suffered by a much-winking poUce to carry on their 
traffic through the night and till noon the next day. 
Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes 
from a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public 
morals in London begin to urge the hucksters and their 
customers to have done with their bargaining, and get 
about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither per- 
suasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the 
police sometimes call in the firemen and rake the market- 
place with volleys from the engine-hose. This is doubt- 
less effective, but at the hour when we passed through 
as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could 
bear, it was still far from the time for such an extreme 
measure, and the market was flourishing as if it were 
there to stay indefinitely. 

Everything immediately imaginable for the outside 
or inside of man seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, 
boots and shoes, hats and caps, glassware, iron-ware; 
fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English hazel- 
nuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to 
ripen on the way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally 
smelling to heaven ; but, above all, flesh meats of every 
beast of the field and every bird of the barn-yard, 
with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and 
strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and 
hides and claws and feathers and other less namable 
refuse. There was a notable absence among the huck- 
sters of that coster class which I used to see in London 
twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the 
swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used 
to distinguish the coster. But among the customers, 
whose number all but forbade our passage through the 
street, with the noise of their feet and voices^ there 

198 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls 
and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever 
were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, 
and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped 
with narrow - brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In 
their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, 
but they looked as if their hearts were, and if no word 
came from their lips with its true quality, but with that 
curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke 
a sound business dialect. 

When we traversed the dense body of the market and 
entered Roscoe Street from Whitecross, we were sur- 
prisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet befitting 
the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual 
clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave 
of George Fox, because of his relation to our colonial 
history in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and we 
thought it well to look into the Friends' Meeting-house 
on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we 
might have brought with us from Whitecross Street. 
A mute sexton welcomed us at the door, and held back 
for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular interior, 
where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk 
as Fox might have preached to in just such a place. 
The only difference was that they now wore artless 
versions of the world's present fashions in dress, and not 
the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with 
Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only 
the antiquated simplicity of the time when Quakerism 
began ; and the people we now saw were more fitly dressed 
than if they had worn it. We sat with them a quarter 
of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders 
on the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, 
apparently more deeply lost in it than the rest. Then 

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LONDON FILMS 

we had freedom (to use their gentle Quaker parlance) 
to depart, and I hope we did so without offence. 

Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill 
Fields, but he owns there is no memorial of him there; 
and there is a stone to mark his grave in the grassy 
space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street. 
If that is really his last resting-place, he lies under the 
shadow of a certain lofty warehouse walls, and in the 
shelter of some trees which on that sunny First Day 
morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by 
which the English foliage confesses before the fall it 
drops sere and colorless to the ground. Some leaves 
had already fallen about the simple monumental stone, 
and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still. 

I will own here that I had more heart in the researches 
which concerned the ancestral Friends of all mankind, 
including so much American citizenship, than in follow- 
ing up some other origins of ours. The reader will per- 
haps have noticed long before that our origins were 
nearly all religious, and that though some of the Amer- 
ican plantations were at first the effect of commercial 
enterprise, they were afterwards by far the greater 
part undertaken by people who desired for themselves, 
if not for others, freedom for the forms of worship for- 
bidden them at home. Our colonial beginnings were 
illustrated by sacrifices and martyrdoms even among 
the lowliest, and their leaders passed in sad vicissitude 
from pulpit to prison, back and forth, until exile became 
their refuge from oppression. No nation could have a 
nobler source than ours had in such heroic fidelity to 
ideals; but it cannot be forgotten that the religious 
freedom, which they all sought, some of them were not 
willing to impart when they had found it; and it is 
known how, in New England especially, they practised 

200 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN 

the lessons of persecution they had learned in Old Eng- 
land. Two provinces stood conspicuously for toleration, 
Rhode Island, for which Roger Williams imagined it 
the first time in history, and Pennsylvania, where, for 
the first time, William Penn embodied in the polity of 
a state the gospel of peace and good-will to men. Neither 
of these colonies has become the most exemplary of our 
commonwealths; both are perhaps, for some reasons, 
the least so in their sections; but, above all the rest, 
their earlier memories appeal to the believer in the 
universal right to religious liberty and in the ideal of 
peaceful democracy which the Quakers alone have 
realized. The Quakers are no longer sensibly a moral 
force ; but the creed of honest work for daily bread, and 
of the equalization of every man with another which 
they lived, can never perish. Their testimony against 
bloodshed was practical, as such a testimony can still 
be, when men will; their principle of equality, as well as 
their practise of it was their legacy to our people, and 
it remains now all that differences us from other na- 
tions. It was not Thomas Jefferson who first imagined 
the first of the self-evident truths of the Declaration, 
but George Fox. 

We went, inappropriately enough, from where George 
Fox lay in his grave, level with the common earth, to 
where, in Finsbury Pavement, the castellated armory 
of the Honourable Artillery Company of London recalls 
the origin of the like formidable body in Boston. These 
gallant men were archers before they were gunners, 
being established in that quality first when the fear of 
Spanish invasion was rife in 1585. They did yeoman 
service against their own king in the Civil War, but 
later fell into despite and were mocked by poets no more 
warlike than themselves. Fletcher's "Knight of the 

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Burning Pestle" was of their company, and Cowper's 
" John Gilpin " was " sl train-band captain." Now, how- 
ever, they are so far restored to their earUer standing 
that when they are called out to celebrate, say, the 
Fourth of July, or on any of the high military occasions 
demanding the presence of royalty, the King appears 
in their uniform. 



XVIII 
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

OUTSIDE the high gate of Bunhill Fields, we could 
do no more than read the great names lettered 
on the gate-posts, and peer through the iron barriers 
at the thickly clustered headstones within. But over 
against the cemetery we had access to the chapel where 
John Wesley preached for thirty years, and behind which 
he is buried. He laid the corner-stone in 1777 amid 
such a multitude of spectators that he could scarcely 
get through to the foundation, Cunningham says. 
Before the chapel is an excellent statue of the great 
preacher, and the glance at the interior which we suf- 
fered ourselves showed a large congregation listening 
to the doctrine which he preached there so long, and 
which he carried beyond seas himself to ourselves, to 
found among us the great spiritual commonwealth 
which is still more populous than any of those dividing 
our country. 

The scene of his labors here was related for me by 
an obscure association to such a doctrinally different 
place as Finsbury Chapel, hard by, where my old friend. 
Dr. Moncure D. Conway preached for twenty years. 
Whatever manner of metaphysician he has ended, he 
began Methodist, and as a Virginian he had a right to a 
share of my interest in that home of Wesleyism, for it 
was in Virginia, so much vaster then than now, that 

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Wesleyism spread widest and deepest. If any part of 
Wesley's mission tended to modify or abolish slavery, 
then a devotion to freedom so constant and generous as 
Conway's should link their names by an irrefragable, 
however subtle, filament of common piety. I wished 
to look into Finsbury Chapel for my old friend's sake, 
but it seemed to me that we had intruded on worship- 
pers enough that morning, and I satisfied my longing 
by a glimpse of the interior through the pane of glass 
let into the inner door. It was past the time for sing- 
ing the poem of Tennyson which "Tom Brown" Hughes 
used to say they always gave out instead of a hymn 
in Finsbury Chapel; and some one else was preaching 
in Conway's pulpit, or at his desk. I do not know 
what weird influence of sermonizing seen but not heard 
took the sense of reality from the experience, but I 
came away feeling as if I had looked upon something 
visionary. 

It was no bad preparation for coming presently to 
the church of All Hallows in the Wall, where a bit of the 
old Roman masonry shows in the foundations of the 
later defences, of which indeed, no much greater length 
remains. The church, which is so uninterestingly ugly as 
not to compete with the relic of Roman wall, stands at 
the base of a little triangle planted with young elms 
that made a green quiet, and murmured to the silence 
with their stiffening leaves. It was an effect possible 
only to that wonderful London which towers so massive- 
ly into the present that you are dimib before the evi- 
dences of its vast antiquity. There must have been a 
time when there was no London, but you cannot think 
it any more than you can think the time when there 
shall be none. I make so sure of these reflections that 
I hope there was no mistake about those modest breadths 

204 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

of Roman masonry; its rubble laid in concrete, was 
strong enough to support the weightiest consideration. 

I am the more anxious about this because my friend, 
the genealogist, here differed with the great Cunning- 
ham, and was leading me by that morsel of Roman 
London to St. Peter's Lane, where he said Fox died, 
and not to White Hart Court, where my other authority 
declares that he made an end two days after preaching 
in the Friends' Meeting-house there. The ignorant dis- 
ciple of both may have his choice ; perhaps in the proc- 
ess of time the two places may have become one and 
the same. At any rate we were able that morning to 
repair our error concerning St. Catherine Cree's, which 
we had unwittingly seen before, and now consciously 
saw, for Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's sake. It had the 
look of very high church in the service which was cele- 
brating, and I am afraid my mind was taken less by the 
monument of Sir Nicholas than by the black-robed 
figure of the young man w^ho knelt with bowed head at 
the back of the church and rapt me with the memory 
of the many sacerdotal shapes which I used to see do- 
ing the Hke in Latin sanctuaries. It is one of the few 
advantages of living long that all experiences become 
more or less contemporaneous, and that at certain 
moments you cannot be distinctly aware just when 
and where you are. 

There was little of this mystical question when our 
mission took us to Whitechapel, for there was nothing 
there to suggest former times or other places. I did, 
indeed, recall the thick - breathed sweltering Sunday 
morning when I had visited the region in July; but it 
is all now so absolutely and sordidly modern that one 
has no difficulty in believing that it was altogether dif- 
ferent when so many Southern and especially Virginian 

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emigrations began there. How many settlers in New 
Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also 
were recruited from it, I know not ; but the reader may 
have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at first- 
hand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names 
of the first quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in 
the colonizing times, was a region of high respectability, 
and not for generations afterwards the perlieu it became, 
and has now again somewhat ceased to be. 

The first exiles from it were not self-banished for 
conscience' sake, like those at a later date when the 
Puritans went both to Massachusetts where they re- 
volted further, and to Virginia where they ultimately 
conformed. The earlier out-goers, though they might 
be come-outers, were part of the commercial enterprise 
which began to plant colonies north and south. The 
Plymouth Company which had the right to the country 
as far northward as Nova Scotia and westward as far 
as the Pacific, and the London Company which had as 
great scope westward and southward as far as Cape 
Fear, had the region between them in common, and they 
both drew upon Whitechapel, and upon Stepney be- 
yond, where I had formerly fancied the present White- 
chapel resuming somewhat of its ancient respectability. 
It is then a "spacious fair street," as one of Cunning- 
ham's early authorities describes it, and it is still " some- 
what long," so long indeed that our tram was a half- 
hour in carrying us through it into Stepney. About 
the time of the emigrations De Foe saw it, or says he 
saw it (you never can be sure with De Foe) thronged 
"with the richer sort of people, especially the nobility 
and gentry from the west part of the town, . . . with 
their families and servants," escaping into the country 

from the plague. 

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

The "offscourings" of London, which the companies 
carried rather more to the southward than the north- 
ward with us, were hardly scoured off in Whitechapel, 
which was a decent enough ancestral source for any 
American strain. As for Stepney, then as now the 
great centre of the London shipping, she has never 
shared the ill-repute of Whitechapel, at least in name. 
Cunningham declares the region once "well-inhabited," 
and the sailors still believe that all children born at sea 
belong to Stepney Parish. By an easy extension of 
this superstition she is supposed to have had a motherly 
interest in all children born beyond seas, including, of 
course, the American colonies, and she is of a presence 
that her foster-folk's descendants need not be ashamed 
of. Our tram took us now and then by an old mansion 
of almost manor-house dignity, set in pleasant gardens; 
and it followed the shore of the Thames in sight of the 
masts of ships whose multitude brought me to disgrace 
for having, on my way to Greenwich, thought poorly 
of London as a port, and which, because of her riparian 
situation, made Stepney the scene of the great strike of 
the London dockers, when they won their fight under 
the lead of John Burns. 

Our lovely weather cooled slightly as the afternoon 
wore away, but it was bright and mild again when we 
came another day towards Stepney as far as the old 
church of St. Dunstan. It is an edifice of good perpen- 
dicular Gothic, with traces of early English and even of 
later Norman, standing serene in a place of quiet graves 
amid the surrounding turmoil of life. The church- 
yard was full of rustling shrubs and bright with beds of 
autumnal flowers, from which the old square tower 
rose in the mellow air. Divers of our early emigrants 
were baptized in St. Dunstan's, namely, the wife of 

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Governor Bradford of Plymouth, with many of our ship- 
men, notably that Master ^A'illoughby, who established 
the ship -yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts. I like 
better to associate with it our beginnings, because here 
I first saw those decorations for the Thanksgiving 
festival which the English have lately borrowed from 
us, and which I found again and again at various points 
in my September wanderings. The pillars were wreathed 
with the flowers and leaves of the fall; the altar was 
decked with apples and grapes, and the pews trimmed 
with yellow heads of ripe wheat. The English Thanks- 
giving comes earlier than ours, but it remembers its 
American source in its name, and the autumn comes 
so much sooner than with us that although the " parting 
summer lingering blooms delayed" in St. Dunstan's 
church-yard, the fallen leaves danced and whirled about 
our feet in the paths. 

There is witness of the often return of the exiles to 
their old home in the quaint epitaph which a writer in 
The Spectator (it might have been Addison himself) read 
from one of the flat tombstones: 

"Here Thomas Taffin lyes interred, ah why? 
Born in New England, did in London die." 

"I do not wonder at this," Dr. Johnson said of the 
epitaph to Boswell. "It would have been strange if 
born in London he had died in New England." 

The good doctor did indeed despise the American 
colonies with a contempt which we can almost reverence ; 
but the thing which he found so strange happened to 
many Londoners before his time. One of the least 
worthy and less known of these was that George Down- 
ing, who came back from Boston, where he was grad- 
uated at Harvard, and took the title of baronet from 

208 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

Charles II., in return, apparently, for giving his name 
to that famous Downing Street, ever since synonymous 
with English administration. If he has no other claim 
to our interest, that is perhaps enough; and the Amer- 
ican who is too often abashed by the humility of our 
London origins may well feel a rise of worldly pride in 
the London celebrity of this quandam fellow-citizen. 
His personality is indeed lost in it, but his achievement 
in laying out a street, and getting it called after him, 
was prophetic of so much economic enterprise of ours 
that it may be fairly claimed as a national honor. 

Of those who preferred not to risk the fate Dr. John- 
son held in scorn, multitudes perished at Whitechapel 
of the plague which it was one of the poor compensa- 
tions of life in New England to escape. They would all 
have been dead by now, whether they went or whether 
they stayed, though it was hard not to attribute their 
present decease solely to their staying, as we turned over 
the leaves of the old register in St. Mary Matfelon's, 
Whitechapel. The church has been more than once 
rebuilt out of recollection of its original self, and there 
were workman still doing something to the interior; but 
the sexton led us into the vestry, and while the sunlight 
played through the waving trees without and softly 
illumined the record, we turned page after page, where 
the names were entered in a fair clear hand, with the 
given cause of death shortened to the letters, pi, after 
each. They were such names as abounded in the colo- 
nies, and those who had borne them must have been of 
the kindred of the emigrants. But my patriotic inter- 
est in them was lost in a sense of the strong nerve of 
the clerk who had written their names and that "pi." 
with such an unshaken hand. One of the earlier dead, 
in the church -yard without, was a certain ragman, 

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Richard Brandon, of whom the register says: "This 
R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of 
Charles the First." 

From the parish of St. Botolph by Aldgate, on the 
road from Houndsditch to Whitechapel, came many of 
those who settled in Salem and the neighboring towns 
of Massachusetts. It is now very low church, as it 
probably was in their day, with a plain interior, and 
with the crimson foliage of the Virginia-creeper staining 
the light like painted glass at one of its windows. The 
bare triangular space in front of the church was once a 
pit where the dead of the plague were thrown, and in 
the sacristy is a thing of yet grislier interest. My 
friend made favor with some outlying authority, and an 
old, dim, silent servitor of some sort came back with 
him and took from a sort of cupboard, where it was kept 
in a glass box, the embalmed head of the Duke of Suf- 
folk, which he lost for his part in the short-lived usurpa- 
tion of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. Little was left 
to suggest the mighty noble in the mummy-face, but the 
tragedy of his death was all there. It seemed as if the 
thoughts of the hideous last moment might still be 
haunting the withered brain, and the agony of which 
none of the dead have yet been able to impart a sense 
to the living, was present in it. As he who was showing 
us the head, turned it obligingly round in view of the ex- 
pected shilling, and tilted it forward that we might see 
the mark of the axe in the severed neck, one seemed to 
see also the things which those sunken eyes had looked on 
last : the swarming visages of the crowd, the inner fringe 
of halberdiers, the black - visored figure waiting beside 
the block. As the doomed man dragged himself to the 
scaffold, how pale that face in the glass box must have 
been, for any courage that kept him above his fate. It 

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that 
such a devilish thing as the death - punishment should 
still be, and that governments should keep on surpass- 
ing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruel- 
est murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever vis- 
ited that church in remembrance of the fact that his 
people came from the same parish ; if he saw the mortal 
relic which held me in such fascination that I could 
scarcely leave the place even when the glass box had 
been locked back to its cupboard, and if the spirits of 
the dead sometimes haunt their dust, there must have 
been a reciprocal intelligence between the dead and the 
living that left no emotion of the supreme hour unim- 
parted. 

We visited St. Sepulchre's where the truly sainted 
Roger Williams was baptized, and found entrance one 
day after two failures to penetrate to its very unattrac- 
tive interior. We were lighted by stained - glass win- 
dows of geometrical pattern and a sort of calico or ging- 
ham effect in their coloring, to the tablet to Captain 
John Smith, whose life Pocahontas, in Virginia, with 
other ladies in divers parts of the world, saved, that we 
might have one of the most delightful, if not one of the 
most credible, of autobiographies. He was of prime 
colonial interest, of course, and we were not taken from 
the thought of him by any charm of the place; but 
when we had identified his time-dimmed tablet there 
was no more to do at St. Sepulchre's. The church is at 
the western end of Old Bailey, and in the dreadful old 
times when every Friday brought its batch of doomed 
men forth from the cells, it was the duty of the bell- 
man of St. Sepulchre's to pass under the prison walls 
the night before and ring his bell, and chant the dismal 
lines : 

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'All you that in the condemned hold do lie, 
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die; 
Watch all, and pray, the hour is drawing near, 
That you before the Almighty must appear; 
Examine well yourselves, in time repent, 
That you may not to eternal flames be sent. 
And when St. Sepulchre's bell to-morrow tolls, 
The Lord above have mercy on your souls. 

Past twelve o'clock." 



When we consider what piety was in the past, we need 
not be so horrified by justice. Sentiment sometimes 
came in to heighten the effect of both, and it used to 
present each criminal in passing St. Sepulchre's on the 
way to Tyburn with a nosegay, and a little farther on 
with a glass of beer. The gardened strip of what once 
must have been a graveyard beside the church could 
hardly have afforded flowers enough for the pious rite. It 
was frequented, the day of our visit, by some old men 
of a very vacant-looking leisure, who sat on the benches 
in the path; and the smallest girl in proportion to the 
baby she carried that I ever saw in that England where 
small girls seem always to carry such very large babies, 
tilted back and forth with it in her slender arms, and 
tried to make-believe it was going to sleep. 

The reader who prefers to develop these films for 
himself must not fail to bring out the surroundings of 
the places visited, if he would have the right effect. 
Otherwise he might suppose the several sanctuaries 
which we visited standing in a dignified space and hal- 
lowed quiet, whereas, all but a few were crowded close 
upon crowded streets, with the busy and noisy indiffer- 
ence of modern life passing before them and round them. 
St. Giles-in-the-Fields, which we visited after leaving St. 
Sepulchre, was the church in which Calvert, the founder 

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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

of Maryland, was baptized, of course before he turned 
Catholic, since it could not very well have been after- 
wards. At the moment, however, I did not think of 
this. I had enough to do with the fact that Chapman, 
the translator of Homer, was buried in that church, and 
Andrew Marvell, the poet, and that very wicked Coun- 
tess of Shrewsbury, the terrible she who held the Duke 
of Buckingham's horse while he was killing her husband 
in a duel. I should, no doubt, have seen this mem- 
orable interior if it had still existed, but it was the in- 
terior of a church which was taken down more than a 
hundred years before the present church was built. 

We visited the church on the way to Lincoln's Inn 
Fields, turning out of Holborn round the corner of the 
house, now a bookseller's shop, where Garrick died. I 
mention this merely as an instance of how the famous 
dead started out of the over-populated London past 
and tried at every step to keep me from my proper 
search for our meaner American origins. I was going 
to look at certain mansions, in which the Lords Balti- 
more used to live, and the patriotic Marylander, if he 
have faith enough, may identify them by their arches 
of gray stone at the first corner on his right in coming 
into the place from Holborn. But if he have not faith 
enough for this, then he may respond with a throb of 
sympathy to the more universal appeal of the undoubted 
fact that Lord Russell was beheaded in the centre of the 
square, which now waves so pleasantly with its elms 
and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king, 
wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the 
cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that, 
and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy "as inde- 
cent," Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson 
had prayed with him, " laid his head on the block at a 

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LONDON FILMS 

spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was 
cut off at two strokes.'' 

Cunningham is certainly very temperate in calling 
Lincoln's Inn Fields "a noble square." 1 should my- 
self call it one of the noblest and most beautiful in 
London, and if the Cal verts did not dwell in one of the 
stately mansions of Arch Row, which is " all that Inigo 
Jones lived to build" after his design for the whole 
square, then they might very well have been proud to 
do so. They are not among the great whom Cunning- 
ham names as having dwelt there, and I do not know 
what foundation the tradition of their residence rests 
upon. What seems more certain is that one of the Cal- 
verts, the first or the second Lord Baltimore, was buried 
in that church of St. Dunstan's in the West, or St. Dun- 
stan's Fleet Street, which was replaced by the actual 
edifice in 1833. 

The reader, now being got so near, may as well go on 
with me to Charing Cross, where in the present scene 
of cabs, both hansoms and four - wheelers, perpetually 
coming and going at the portals of the great station and 
hotel, and beside the torrent of omnibuses in the Strand, 
the Reverend Hugh Peters suffered death through the 
often broken faith of Charles II. In one of the most de- 
lightful of his essays, Lowell humorously portrays the 
character of the man who met this tragic fate : a restless 
and somewhat fatuous Puritan divine, who, having 
once got safely away from persecution to Boston, came 
back to London in the Civil War, and took part in the 
trial of Charles I. If not one of the regicides, he was 
very near one, and he shared the doom from which the 
treacherous pardon of Charles 11. was never intended 
to save them. I suppose his fatuity was not incom- 
patible with tragedy, though somehow we think that 

214 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

absurd people are not the stuff of serious experi- 
ence. 

Leigh Hunt, in that most deUghtful of all books about 
London, The Town, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street, 
Strand, was once the dwelling of Benjamin Franklin, 
and he adds, with the manliness which is always such a 
curious element of his unmanliness: "What a change 
along the shore of the Thames in a few years (for two 
centuries are less than a few in the lapse of time) from 
the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never 
dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a 
tradesman, to that of a yeoman's son, and a printer, 
who was one of the founders of a great state!'' 

Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street, 
Strand, a state which led in the attempted dismember- 
ment of that great state, and nearly wrought its ruin, 
had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was there 
John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina, 
which still, I believe, remains its organic law. One has 
one's choice among the entirely commonplace yellow 
brick buildings, which give the street the aspect of an 
old-fashioned place in Boston. The street was seriously 
quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot- 
passengers sauntering through it, and certain clerklike 
youth entering and issuing from the doors of the build- 
dings which had the air of being law-offices. 

We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very 
attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to 
him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs 
and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. 
But when we had climbed to the triforium by the cork- 
screw stairs leading to it, did we find there tombs and 
tablets? I am not sure, but I am sure we found the 
tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a History of the 
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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who while 
in Padiament strongly favored "distressing the Amer- 
icans," as the king wished, and made a speech in sup- 
port of the government measure for closing the port of 
Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge for that, 
but I could not give myself to his monument with such 
cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and 
volatile old letter-writer James Howell, which also I 
found in that triforium, half -hidden behind a small 
organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in the dim- 
ness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this, 
after looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus 
College in Oxford, where he studied the humanities that 
enabled him to be so many things to so many masters, 
that I took all his chiselled praises for granted. 

I made what amends I could for my slight of the 
Mortons in the Temple Church, by crossing presently 
to Clifford's Inn, Strand, where the very founder of 
Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself 
was sometime student of the law and a dweller in these 
precincts. It is now the hall of the Art Workers' Guild, 
and anywhere but in London would be incredibly quiet 
and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern neigh- 
borhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and 
roistering antipuritan, who set up his May -pole at 
Wollaston, and danced about it with his debauched 
abcriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles Standish 
marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such 
ungodly doings at the muzzles of his matchlocks. 

It must have been another day that we went to view the 
church of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, because some 
of the patrician families emigrating to Massachusetts 
were from that parish, which was the home of many 
patrician families of the Commonwealth.- In St. An- 

216 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

drew's Holborn, the Vanes, father and son, worshipped, 
together with the kindred of many that had gone to 
dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior, 
after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our 
visit was smelling of varnish; most London churches 
smell of mortar, when in course of their pretty constant 
reparation, and this was at least a change. St. Stephen's 
Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as 
the spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport, 
who was the founder of New Haven, but it will attract 
the unlocalized lover of liberty because it was also the 
parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom 
Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for 
trouble. It had a certain sentiment of low-churchness, 
being very plain without and within not unlike an 
Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England 
town. One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean 
court, out of a business neighborhood, jostled by com- 
mercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats who were ex- 
pressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy 
with the past if not with the present of St. Andrew's. 

St. Martins-in-the-Fields, where General Oglethorpe, 
the founder of Georgia, was baptized, was, in his time, 
one of the proudest parishes of the city, and the actual 
church is thought to be the masterpiece of the architect 
Gibbs, who produced in the portico what Cunningham 
calls "one of the finest pieces of architecture in Lon- 
don." Many famous people were buried in the earlier 
edifice, including Nell Gwynne, Lord Mohun, who fell 
in a duel with the Duke of Hamilton, as the readers of 
Henry Esmond well know, and Farquhar the dramatist. 
Lord Bacon was baptized there; and the interior of the 
church is very noble and worthy of him and of the 
parish history. Whether General Oglethorpe drew 

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upon his native parish in promoting the settlement of 
Georgia, I am not so sure as I am of some other things, 
as, for instance, that he asked the king for a grant of 
land, "in trust for the poor," and that his plan was to 
people his colony largely from the captives in the debt- 
ors' prisons. I love his memory for that, and I would 
gladly have visited the debtors' prisons which his hu- 
manity vacated if I could have found them, or if they 
had still existed. 

The reader who has had the patience to accompany 
me on these somewhat futile errands must have been 
aware of making them largely on the lordly omnibus- 
tops which I always found so much to my proud taste. 
Often, however, we whisked together from point to 
point in hansoms; often we made our way on foot, with 
those quick transitions from the present to the past, 
from the rush and roar of business thoroughfares to the 
deep tranquillity of religious interiors, or the noise- 
bound quiet of ancient church-yards, where the autumn 
flowers blazed under the withering autumn leaves, and 
the peaceful occupants of the public benches were 
scarcely more agitated by our coming than the tenants 
of the graves beside them. 

The weather was for the most part divinely beautiful, 
so tenderly and evenly cool and w^arm, with a sort of 
lingering fondness in the sunshine, as if it were prescient 
of the fogs so soon to blot it. The first of these came on 
the last day of our research, when suddenly we dropped 
from the clouded surfaces of the earth to depths where 
the tube-line trains carry their passengers from one 
brilliantly lighted station to another. We took three 
of the different lines, experimentally, rather than neces- 
sarily, in going from St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard 
Street, hard by the Bank of England, to the far neigh- 

218 




ANCIENT CHURCH OF ST. MARTINS-IN-THEFIELDS 



AMERICAN ORIGINS-MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

borhood of Stoke Newington; and at each descent by 
the company's Uft, we left the dark above ground, and 
found the hght fifty feet below. While this sort of 
transit is novel, it is delightful; the air is good, or seems 
so, and there is a faint earthy smell, somewhat like that 
of' stale incense in Italian churches, which I found 
agreeable from association at least; besides, I liked to 
think of passing so far beneath all the superincumbent 
death and all the superambulant life of the immense 
immemorial town. 

We found St. Mary Woolnoth closed, being too early 
for the Sunday service, and had to content ourselves 
with the extremely ugly outside of the church which is 
reputed the masterpiece of Wren's pupil Hawksmoor; 
while we took for granted the tablet or monument of 
Sir William Phipps, the governor of Massachusetts, 
who went back to be buried there after the failure of his 
premature expedition against Quebec. My friend had 
provided me something as remote from Massachusetts 
as South Carolina in colonial interest, and we were 
presently speeding to New River, which Sir Hugh Myd- 
dleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke 
Newington to all the streets of London, and so originated 
her modern water-supply. This knight, or baronet, 
he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist, to be of 
the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of 
the first South Carolinians then and since. It is at least 
certain that he was a Welshman, and that the gift of 
his engineering genius to London was so ungratefully 
received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his enter- 
prise. The king claimed a half-interest in the profits, but 
the losses remained undivided to Myddleton. ^ The fact, 
such as it is, proves perhaps the weakest link in a chain 
of patriotic associations which, I am afraid the reader 

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LONDON FILMS 

must agree with me, has no great strength anywhere. 
The New River itself, when you come to it, is a plain 
straightforward, canal -like water -course through a 
grassy and shady level, but it is interesting for the gar- 
den of Charles Lamb's first house backing upon it, and 
for the incident of some of his friends walking into it 
one night when they left him after an evening that 
might have been rather unusually "smoky and drinky." 
Apart from this I cared for it less than for the neighbor- 
hoods through which I got to it, and which were looking 
their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and 
richest among the low trees of Highbury Fields, where, 
when we ascended to them from our tubular station, the 
lawns were of an electric green in their vividness. In 
fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends 
itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the pre- 
vailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into 
a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon 
rows of humble brick dwellings in the streets we passed 
through were flattered into cottage homes where one 
would have liked to live in one's quieter moods, and 
some rather stately eighteenth - century mansions in 
Stoke Newington housed one's pride the more fittingly, 
because of the mystery which the fog added to their 
antiquity. It hung tenderly and reverently about 
that old, old parish church of Stoke Newington where, 
it is story or fable, they that bore the body of the dead 
King Harold from the field of Hastings made one of 
their stations on the way to AValtham Abbey; and it was 
much in the maundering mind of the kindly spectator 
who could not leave off pitying us because we could not 
get into the church, the sexton having just before gone 
down the street to the baker's. It followed us more 
and more vaguely into the business quarter where we 

220 



AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN 

took our omnibus, and where we noted that business Lon- 
don, Hke business New York, was always of the same 
complexion and temperament in its shops and saloons, 
from centre to circumference. Amid the commonplace- 
ness of Islington where we changed omnibuses, the fog 
abandoned us in despair, and rising aloof, dissolved into 
the bitterness of a small cold rain. 



XIX 

ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

THE fog, through that golden month of September 
(September is so silvern in America), was more or 
less a fact of the daily weather. The morning began 
in a mellow mistiness, which the sun burned through 
by noon; or if sometimes there was positive rain, it 
would clear for a warm sunset, which had moments of 
a very pretty pensiveness in the hollows of Green Park, 
or by the lakes of St. James's. There were always the 
bright beds of autumn flowers, and in Hyde Park some- 
thing of the season's flush came back in the driving. 
The town began to be visibly fuller, and I was aware of 
many Americans, in carriages and on foot, whom I 
fancied alighting after a continental summer, and 
poising for another flight to their respective steamers. 
The sentiment of London was quite different at the end 
of September from the sentiment of London at the be- 
ginning, and one could imagine the sort of secondary 
season which it revisits in the winter. There was in- 
deed no hint of the great primary season in the sacred 
paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where 
the inverted penny chairs lay with their foreheads in 
the earth ; and the shrivelled leaves, loosened from their 
boughs in the windless air, dropped listlessly round 
them. 

At night our little Mayfair Street was the haunt of 

222 



ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

much voluntary minstrelsy. Bands of cockney darkeys 
came down it, tuning their voices to our native rag- 
time. Or a balladist, man or woman, took the centre, 
and sang towards our compassionate windows. Or a 
musical husband and wife placed their portable melodeon 
on the opposite sidewalk, and trained their vocal and in- 
strumental attack upon the same weak defences. 

It was all in keeping with the simple kindliness of the 
great town whose homelikeness arises from its immense 
habitability. This always strikes the New-Yorker, 
whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful New- 
Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the 
ampler metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted 
spaces where man may peacefully dwell, or quietly 
lodge over-night, in his own city. In assimilating each 
of the smaller towns or villages which it has made itself 
up of London has left them so much of their original 
character that though merged, they are not lost ; and in 
cases where they have been so long merged as to have 
experienced a severance of consciousness, or where they 
are only nominally different sections of the vast whole, 
they have each its own temperament. It would be 
quite impossible for one finding one's self in Blooms- 
bury to suppose one's self in Belgravia, or in any of the 
Kensingtons to fancy one's self in Mayfair. Chelsea is 
as temperamentally different from Pimlico as the City 
from Southwark, and Islington, again, though it speaks 
the same language as Whitechapel, might well be of 
another tongue, so differently does it think and feel. 
The names, and a hundred others, call to the stranger 
from the sides and fronts and backs of omnibuses, until 
he has a weird sense that they personally knew him 
long before he knew them. But when once domesti- 
cated in any quarter he is so quickly at home in it that 

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LONDON FILMS 

it will be the centre of London for him, coming to and 
going from it in a local acceptance which he cannot help 
feeling a reciprocal kindliness. He might do this as a 
mere hotel-dweller, but if he has given hostages to 
fortune by going into lodgings, and forming even in- 
direct relations with the tradesmen round the corners, 
the little stationers and newsmen, the nearest book- 
seller, the intelligent female infants in the post-office 
(which is always within a minute's walk), and perhaps 
conversed with the neighboring policeman, or has taken 
cabs so often from the neighboring rank as to be recog- 
nizable to the cabmen, then he is more quickly and 
thoroughly naturaHzed in the chosen region. He will 
be unworthy of many little friendlinesses from his 
fellow-citizens if he does not like them, and he will miss, 
in refusing the image of home which is offered him, one 
of the rarest consolations of exile. 

At a distance from London (say as small a distance, 
in time if not space, as Bath), you will hear it said that 
everybody is well in London, but in London you will 
find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish. 
All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are re- 
laxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange 
then that London should be likewise subdivided. May- 
fair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and 
more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terri- 
bly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, Chelsea again is bracing, 
and as for South Kensington it stands to reason that it 
is bracing because it is very high, almost as high as 
Mayfair. If you pass from your Pimlico borderland of 
Belgravia to either of those regions you are certainly 
not sensible of any sharp accent, but there is no telling 
what a gradual rise of eight or ten feet may make in 
the quality of the air. To the stranger all London seems 

224 



ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

a vast level, with perhaps here and there the sort of 
ground-swell you may note from your car-window in 
the passage of a Western plain. Ludgate Hill is truly 
a rise of ground, but Tower Hill is only such a bad 
eminence as may gloomily lift itself in history irrespec- 
tive of the actual topography. Such an elevation as 
our own Murray Hill would be a noticeable height in 
London, and there are no such noble inequalities as in 
our up -town streets along the Hudson. All great 
modern cities love the plain surfaces, and London is 
not different from Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Paris, or 
Berlin, or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Milan in this; 
New York is much more mountainous, and Boston is a 
Sierra Nevada in comparison. 

Yet, I suppose there must be something in the super- 
stition that one part of London is more bracing or more 
relaxing than another, and that there is really, however 
insensibly, a difference of levels. That difference of 
temperaments which I have mentioned, seems mostly 
intimated in the size and age of the houses. They are 
larger and older in Bloomsbury, where they express a 
citizen substance and comfort; they are statelier about 
the parks and squares of Belgravia, which is compara- 
tively a new settlement; but there are more little houses 
among the grandeurs of Mayfair which is of the same 
social quality, though many of its streets crossing from 
Piccadilly have quite gone to shops and family hotels 
and lodgings. It is more irregular and ancient than 
Belgravia, and its grandeurs have a more casual air. 
The historic mansions crowded by the clubs towards 
Hyde Park Corner, and grouped about the open space 
into which Piccadilly falters there, or following the park 
in the flat curve of Park Lane, have not the effect of 
withdrawal and exclusion of the Belgravian mansions; 

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LONDON FILMS 

beyond which again there is a world of small dwellings 
of fainter and fainter self-assertion till they fade into 
the hopeless plebeian unconsciousness of Pimlico, whose 
endless streets are without beauty or dignity. Yet 
beyond this lost realm Chelsea redeems itself in a grace 
of domestic architecture and an atmosphere of sesthetic 
associations which make it a favorite abode of the 
tastes as well as the means. Kensington, where you 
arrive after what seems hopeless straggling through the 
roaring thoroughfare prolonging the Fleet-and-Strand- 
derived Piccadilly, is of almost equal artistic and literary 
appeal, but is older and perhaps less actual in its claims 
upon the cultivated sympathies. In either of these 
regions the polite American of definite resources might, 
if banished from the republic, dwell in great material 
and spiritual comfort; but if he chose Chelsea for his 
exile, I do not know that I should blame his preference. 
There he would have the neighborhood of many charm- 
ing people whom to know for neighbors would add a 
certain grace to existence, although he might not other- 
wise know them. Besides he would have, beyond the 
Thames, the wooded stretch of Battersea Park, if his 
dwelling, as it very well might, looked out upon the 
river and across it; and in the distance he would have 
the roofs and chimneys of that far Southwark, which 
no one seems anxious to have nearer than, say, the 
seventeenth century, and yet which being a part of 
London must be full of perfectly delightful people. 

Even if you make-believe that Southwark bears 
some such relation to London as Jersey City bears to 
New York (but the image is very imperfect) still New 
York, you are aware, can never domesticate the Hudson 
as London has domesticated the Thames. Our river 
is too vast, too grand, if you will, ever to be redeemed 

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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

from its primitive wildness, much less made an intimate 
part of the city's hfe. It may be laced with ferries and 
bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave 
with its swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and 
bridged hereafter, again and again, but its mere size 
will keep it savage, just as a giant, though ever so ami- 
able and good-natured, could not imaginably be civilized 
as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among 
rivers the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average, 
and is therefore perfectly proportioned to the little 
continent of which it is the Amazon or the Mississippi. 
If it were larger it would make England ridiculous, as 
Denmark, for instance, is made ridiculous by the sounds 
and estuaries that sunder it. But the Thames is of 
just the right size to be held in London's arms, and if it 
is not for her the graceful plaything that the Seine is 
for Paris, it is more suited to the practical nature of 
London. There are, so far as I noted, no whispering 
poplars planted by the brink of the Thames, but I feel 
sure that if there were, and there were citizens fishing 
their years away in their shade, they would sometimes 
catch a fish, which the life-long anglers in the Seine 
never do. That forms a great difference, expressive 
of a lasting difference of character in the two capitals. 
Along the Thames the trees are planted on the successive 
Embankments, in a beautiful leafy parkway following 
its course, broken here and there by public edifices, hke 
the Parliament buildings, but forming a screen most- 
ly uninterrupted, behind which a parade of grandiose 
hotels does not altogether hide itself from the river. 
Then the national quality of the English stream is ex- 
pressed in the succession of bridges which span it. 
These are uglier than any that cross the Seine ; each one, 
in fact, is uglier than the other, till you come to the 

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LONDON FILMS 

Tower Bridge, which is the ugUest of all. They have a 
strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to 
the stranger who lounges on their parapets and looks 
down upon the grimy little steamers scuttling under 
them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over 
the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an ad- 
mirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types 
which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent 
slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and 
resting their blunt snouts on the mud-banks in a slum- 
berous content. 

It is seldom that the prospect reveals a vessel of more 
dignified proportions or presence, though in my drives 
along one of the Embankments I came upon a steamer 
of the modest size which we used to think large when 
we crossed the Atlantic in it, but which might be swung 
among the small boats from the davits of a latter-day 
liner. This vessel always had an admiring crowd about 
it, and I suppose it had some peculiar interest for the 
public which did not translate itself to me. As far as 
the more visible commerce of the more sight-seen parts 
of the Thames is concerned, it is as unimpressive as 
may be. It has nothing of the dramatic presence of the 
shipping in the Hudson or the East River, with its light 
operatic touches in the gayly painted Sound and North 
River steamboats. You must go as far at least as 
Stepney on the Thames before you begin to realize that 
London is the largest port, as well as the largest city, in 
the world. 

There are certain characteristics, qualities, of London 
which I am aware of not calling aright, but which I 
will call sentiments for want of some better word. One 
of them was the feel of the night-air, especially late in 
the season, when there was a waste and weariness in it 

228 



ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

as if the vast human endeavor for pleasure and success 
had exhaled its despair upon it. Whatever there was of 
disappointment in one's past, of apprehension in one's 
future, came to the surface of the spirit, and asserted its 
unity with the collective melancholy. It was not ex- 
actly a WeJtschrnerz; that is as out-dated as the roman- 
tic movement; but it was a sort of scientific relinquish- 
ment, which was by no means scornful of others, or too 
appreciative of one's own unrecognized worth. Through 
the senses it related itself to the noises of the quiescing 
city, to the smell of its tormented dust, to the whiff of a 
casual cigar, or the odor of the herbage and foliage in 
the park or square that one was passing, one may not be 
more definite about what was perhaps nothing at all. 
But I fancy that relinquishment of any sort would be 
easier in London than in cities of simpler interest or 
smaller population. For my own part I was content to 
deny many knowledges that I would have liked to be- 
lieve myself possessed of, and to go about clothed in my 
ignorance as in a garment, or defended by it as by 
armor. There was a sort of luxury in passing through 
streets memorable for a thousand things and as dense 
with associations as Long Island with mosquitoes when 
the winds are low, and in reflecting that I need not be 
ashamed for neglecting in part what no man could 
know in whole. I really suppose that upon any other 
terms the life of the cultivated American would be 
hardly safe from his own violence in London. If one 
did not shut one's self out from the complex appeal 
to one's higher self one could hardly go to one's tailor 
or one's hatter or one's shoemaker, on those missions 
which, it is a national superstition with us, may be 
more inexpensively fulfilled there than at home. The 
best way is to begin by giving up everything, by frankly 

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LONDON FILMS 

saying to yourself that you will not be bothered, that 
man's days of travel are full of trouble, and that you 
are going to get what little joy you can out of them as 
you go along. Then, perhaps, on some errand of quite 
ignoble purport, you will be seized with the knowledge 
that in the very spot where you stand one of the most 
significant things in history happened. It will be quite 
enough for you, as you inhale a breath of the London 
mixture of smoke, dust, and fog, that it is something like 
the air which Shakespeare and Milton breathed when 
they were meditating the works which have given so 
many international after-dinner orators the assurance 
of a bond of amity in our common language. Once, in 
driving through one of the dullest streets imaginable, 
I chanced to look out of the side-window of my hansom, 
and saw on a flying house-wall a tablet reading: "Here 
lived John Dry den," and though Dry den is a poet to 
move one to tenderness as little as may be, the tears 
came into my eyes. 

It is but one of a thousand names, great in some sort 
or other, which make sojourn in London impossible, if 
one takes them to heart as an obligation to consciousness 
of her constant and instant claim. They show you 
Johnson's house in Bolt Court, but it only avails to vex 
you with the thought of the many and many houses of 
better and greater men which they will never show you. 
As for the scenes of events in fiction you have a plain 
duty to shun them, for in a city where the great facts 
of the past are written so deep upon the walls and 
pavement one over another, it is folly which can be 
forgiven only to the vacancy of youth to go looking for 
the places where this imaginary thing happened. Yet 
this claim of folly has been recognized, and if you wish 
to indulge it, you can do so at little trouble. Where 

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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 

the real localities are not available they have fictitious 
ones, and they show you an Old Curiosity Shop, for 
instance, which serves every purpose of having been the 
home of Little Nell. There are at least three Cock 
Taverns, and several Mitres, all genuine; and so on. 
Forty odd years ago I myself, on first arriving in London, 
lodged at the Golden Cross, because it was there that 
David Copperfield stopped; and I was insensately 
pleased the other day that there was still a hotel of that 
name at the old stand. Whether it was the old inn, I 
did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I doubt 
if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee- 
room"; more probably you have a table d^hdte meal 
served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just 
beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly 
waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very 
likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that 
the recreant American whom I heard telling an English- 
man there in those disheartening days, of our civic 
corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that 
he himself had bought votes, as many as he wanted, in 
the city of Providence; and though I could deny the 
general prevalence of such venality at least in my own 
stainless state of Ohio, I did not think to suggest that 
in such a case the corruption was in the buyer rather 
than the seller of the votes, and that if he had now 
come to live, as he implied, in a purer country, he had 
not taken the right way to be worthy of it. But at 
twenty-four you cannot think of everything at once, 
and a recreant American is so uncommon that you need 
hardly, at any age, provide for him. 

i6 



XX 

PARTING GUESTS 

HOWEVER the Golden Cross Inn may have inwardly 
or outwardly changed, the Golden Cross Hotel 
keeps its old place hard by the Charing Cross station, 
which is now so different from the station of the earlier 
day. I do not think it is one of the most sympathetic 
of the London ' stations. I myself prefer rather the 
sentiment of the good old Euston station, which con- 
tinues for you the feeling of arrival in England, and keeps 
you in the glow of landing that you have, or had in the 
days when you always landed in Liverpool, and the 
constant Cunarders and Inmans ignored the upstart pre- 
tensions of Southampton and Plymouth to be ports of 
entry from the United States. But among the stations 
of minor autobiographical interest. Charing Cross is un- 
doubtedly the first, and you may have your tenderness 
for it as the place where you took the train for the night- 
boat at Folkestone in first crossing to the continent. 
How strange it all was, and yet how not unfriendly; for 
there is always a great deal of human nature in England. 
She is very motherly, even with us children who ran 
away from home, and only come back now and then to 
make sure that we are glad of having done so. In the 
lamp-broken obscurity of the second-class carriage I 
am aware still of a youthful exile being asked his destina- 
tion, and then his derivation, by a gentle old lady in the 

232 



PARTING GUESTS 

seat opposite (she might have been Mother England in 
person), who, hearing that he was from America where 
the civil war was then very unpromising, could only 
say, comfortingly: "And very glad to be out of it, / 
dare say!" He must protest, but if he failed to con- 
vince, how could he explain that part of his high mission 
to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was 
to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers 
which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon 
our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had 
eventually to do little or no sweeping of that sort; for no 
privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he de- 
voted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the 
chief of those ports. 

It was the first of many departures from London, 
where you are always more or less arriving or departing 
as long as you remain in England. It is indeed an 
axiom with the natives that if you want to go from any 
one point to any other in the island it is easier to come 
to London and start afresh for it, than to reach the point 
across country. The trains to and from the capital are 
swifter and more frequent, and you are not likely to lose 
your way in the mazes of Bradshaw if you consult the 
indefinitely simplified ABC tables which instruct you 
how to launch yourself direct from London upon any 
objective, or to recoil from it. My impression is that 
you habitually drive to a London station as nearly in 
time to take your train as may be, and that there is very 
little use for waiting-rooms. This may be why the 
waiting-room seems so small and unattractive a part of 
the general equipment. It never bears any such pro- 
portion to the rest as the waiting-rooms in the great 
Boston stations, or even that of the Grand Central in 
New York, and is by no chance so really fine as that of 

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LONDON FILMS 

the Atchison and Topeka at Omaha, or that of the Lake 
Shore at Pittsburg. Neither the management nor the 
chmate is so unkind as to keep intending passengers 
from the platforms, where they stand talking, or walk 
up and down, or lean from their carriage-doors and 
take leave of attendant friends with repeated pathos. 
With us it is either too cold or too hot to do that, and at 
all the great stations we are now fenced off from the 
tracks, as on the Continent, and unless we can make 
favor with the gateman, must despatch our farewells 
before our parting dear ones press forward to have their 
tickets punched. But at no London station, and far 
less at any provincial station in England, are you sub- 
jected to these formalities; and the English seem to 
linger out their farewells almost abusively, especially 
if they are young and have much of life before them. 

Charing Cross has the distinction, sole among her 
sister stations, of a royal entrance. There is no doubt 
a reason for this; but as royalty is always coming and 
going in every direction, it is not easy to know why the 
other stations do not provide themselves with like 
facilities. One cannot imagine just how the king and 
queen get in and out of the common gateway, but it 
has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross, no 
matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither 
has any other station a modern copy of a Queen 
Eleanor's Cross, but this is doubtless because no other 
station was the last of these points where her coffin was 
set down on its way from Lincoln to its final resting- 
place in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret 
their lack after you have seen such an original cross as 
that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety 
which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was 
faithful and earnest, it was not somehow the art of 

234 



PARTING GUESTS 

1291. One feels no greater hardness in the ParUamen- 
tary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony 
fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern 
work, and refuses to be softened by any effect of the 
mellowing London air. It looks out over the scurry 
of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the rain- 
fall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as 
anything in the Strand. It is only an instance of the 
constant futility of the restoration which, in a world so 
violent or merely wearing as ours, must still go on, and 
give us dead corpses of the past instead of living images. 
Fortunately it cannot take from Charing Cross its pre- 
eminence among the London railway stations, which is 
chiefly due to its place in the busy heart of the town, 
and to that certain openness of aspect, which some- 
times, as with the space at Hyde Park Corner, does the 
effect of sunniness in London. It may be nearer or 
farther, as related to one's own abode, but it has not 
the positive remoteness from the great centres, by force 
of which, for instance, Waterloo seems in a peripheral 
whirl of non-arrival, and Vauxhall lost somewhere in 
a rude borderland, and King's Cross bewildered in a 
roar of tormented streets beyond darkest Bloomsbury. 
Even Paddington, which is of a politer situation, and is 
the gate of the beautiful West-of-England country, has 
not the allure of Charing Cross; even Euston which so 
sweetly prolongs the old-fashioned Liverpool voyage 
from New York, and keeps one to the last moment in a 
sense of home, really stays one from London by its 
kind reluctance. It is at Charing Cross alone that you 
are immediately and unmistakably in the London of 
your dreams. 

I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or de- 
parted from all the great stations, but I will not make 

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LONDON FILMS 

so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid that I was, more 
strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of so 
marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures 
in it, and gave me an illusion of Italy, though I was 
explicitly there because of an American origin in the 
baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do not 
remember the name of that little church, but it stood 
among autmim flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny 
morning, where the reader will easily find it. Of Vic- 
toria station I am many times certain, for it was from 
it that we at last left London, and that at the time of 
an earlier sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which 
stamped our sense of the world's metropolis with a 
completeness which it had hitherto disappointingly 
wanted. 

It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover, 
but not imcommonly dull for an evening of the English 
November, and we did not notice that we had emerged 
from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the 
corridors of the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a 
confident spirit of our party declared to be smoke, in 
expression of the alarming conviction that the house 
was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed troubled 
by the smoke, however, and with a prompt recurrence 
to the reading which makes the American an intimate 
of the English circumstance though he has never per- 
sonally kno'wn it, we realized that what seemed smoke 
must be a very marked phase of London fog. It did 
not perceptibly thicken in-doors that night, but the 
next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day 
after the next. All the same the town was invisibly 
astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments 
between total and partial blindness. The usual motives 
and incentives were at work in the business of men, 

236 



PARTING GUESTS 

more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking. 
From the height of an upper window one could look 
down and feel the city's efforts to break the mesh of its 
weird captivity, with an invisible stir in all directions, 
as of groping. Of course, life had to go on, upon such 
terms as it could, and if you descended from your 
window that showed nothing, and went into the street, 
and joined the groping, you could make out something 
of its objects. With a cabman who knew his way, as a 
pilot knows his way on a river in a black night, you 
could depart and even arrive. In the course of your 
journey you would find the thoroughfare thick with 
hesitating or arrested traffic. At one place you would 
be aware of a dull, red light, brightening into a veiled 
glare, and you would have come upon a group of horses, 
detached from several omnibuses, and standing head to 
head till they might hopefully be put to and driven 
on again. The same light, with the torches carried by 
boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly 
creeping forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of 
flame made by the cab-lamps were craning their necks 
forward, or twitching them from side to side. Through 
the press foot-passengers found their way across the 
street, and imaginably in the dark that swallowed up 
the sidewalks, they were going and coming on errands 
that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they 
could know which way they were going, or how they 
could expect to reach any given point. 

Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest, 
and there it was a greenish-yellow, like water when you 
open your eyes and look at it far below the surface. 
Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in 
a square, or with a park on one side, the vapor thick- 
ened into blackness and seemed to swell, a turbid tide, 

237 



LONDON FILMS 

overhead and underfoot. It hurt your straining eyes, 
and got into your throat, and burned it Uke a sullen 
steam. If your cab stopped, miraculously enough, at 
the address given, you got out incredulous and fearful 
of abandonment. When you emerged again, and found 
your cab waiting, you mutely mounted to your place 
and resumed your strange quality of something in a 
dream. 

So, all that day the pall hung upon the town, and all 
the next. The third day the travellers were to sail 
from Liverpool, and there was some imperative last- 
shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous 
cab, and started for Bond Street. In a few moments 
the cab was in the thick of the fog and its consequences, 
a tangle of stationary vehicles with horses detached, 
or marking time, without advancing either way. A 
trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof, 
and a trembUng voice asked the cabman: "Do you 
think you can go on?" "I think so, sir." The horse's 
head had already vanished; now his haunches faded 
away. Towards the dashboard the shafts of another 
cab came yawing, and again the eager voice quavered: 
"Do you think you can get back?" " Oh yes, sir," the 
answer came more cheerfully, and the shopping was 
done a week later in Twenty-third Street. 

There is an insensate wish in the human witness to 
have nature when she begins misbehaving do her worst. 
One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps 
is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent 
type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the 
secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must 
form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we 
had experienced. But you see the blizzard once in a 
generation or a century, while if you are good, or good 

238 



PARTING GUESTS 

enough to live in London, you may see a charac- 
teristic fog almost any year. It is another case in 
which the metropolis of the New World must yield to 
the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do 
not say but the fog in which we left New York, on 
March 3, 1904, was not as perfect as our great London 
fog. But the New York fog was only blindingly white 
and the London fog blindingly black, and that is a 
main difference. 

The tender and hesitating mist with which each day 
of our final September in London began, must not be 
confused in the reader's mind with a true London fog. 
The mist grew a little heavier, day by day, perhaps; 
but only once the sun failed to burn through it before 
noon, and that was one of the first days of October, as 
if in September it had not yet lost the last of its summer 
force. Even then, though it rained all the forenoon, 
and well into the afternoon, the weather cleared for a 
mild, warm sunset, and we could take the last of our 
pleasant walks from Half-Moon Street into St. James's 
Park. 

When the last day of our London sojourn came, it 
was fitly tearful, and we had our misgivings of the 
Channel crossing. The crossing of the day before had 
been so bad that Pretty Polly, who had won the St. 
Leger, held all England in approving suspense, while 
her owners decided that she should not venture to the 
defeat that awaited her in France, till the sea was 
smoother. But in the morning the papers prophesied 
fair weather, and it was promised that Pretty Polly 
should cross. Her courage confirmed our own, and 
we took our initial departure in the London fashion 
which is so different from the New York fashion. Not 
with the struggle, personally and telephonically, in an 

239 



LONDON FILMS 

exchange of bitter sarcasms prolonged with the haughty 
agents of the express monopoly, did we get our bag- 
gage expensively before us to the station and toUow in 
a costly coupe, but with all our trunks piled upon two 
reasonable four-wheelers, we set out contemporane- 
ously with them. In New York we paid six dollars 
for our entire transportation to the steamer; in London 
we paid six shillings to reach the Victoria station with 
our belongings. The right fare would have been five; 
the imagination of our cabman rose to three and six 
each, and feebly fluttered there, but sank to three, and 
did not rise again. At our admirable lodging the land- 
lady, the butler and the chambermaid had descended 
with us to the outer door in a smiling convention of 
regret, the kindly Swiss boots allowed the street porter 
to help him up with our trunks, and we drove away in 
the tradition of personal acceptability which bathes 
the stranger in a gentle self-satisfaction, and which 
prolonged itself through all the formalities of registering 
our baggage for the continent at the station, of bribing 
the guard in the hope of an entire first-class compart- 
ment to ourselves and then sharing it with four others 
similarly promised its sole use, and of telegraphing to 
secure seats in the rapide from Calais to Paris. 

Then we were off in a fine chill, small English rain 
through a landscape in which all the forms showed like 
figures in blotting-paper, as Taine said, once for all. 
After we had run out of the wet ranks of yellowish- 
black city houses, and passed the sullen suburbs, 

"All in a death-doing autumn-dripping gloom," 

we found ourselves in a world which was the dim ghost 
of the English country we had so loved in the summer. 
On some of the trees and hedgerows the leaves hung 

240 



PARTING GUESTS 

dull yellow or dull red, but on most they were a blacken- 
ing green. The raw green of the cold flat meadows^ 
the purplish green of the interminable ranks of cabbages, 
and the harsh green of the turnip-fields, blurred with the 
reeking yellow of mustard blOom, together with the 
gleaming brown of ploughed fields, formed a prospect 
from which the eye turned with the heart, in a rapturous 
vision of the South towards which we were now swiftly 
pulsing. 



THE END 



uui i<j lyt;^ 



